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Jon Courtenay Grimwood
| Full Name: |
Jon
David Giles
Grimwood |
| Born: |
Valetta, Malta |
| Occupation: |
Writer |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Links: |
|
Biography
Born in Malta, 10 weeks early following a water-skiing accident, he was kept from his family and cared for by Catholic nuns for the first week in case he died. During this period the ghost of a black-robbed priest was seen bending over his crib. Christened in the upturned bell of a destroyer, he spent his early years in a house on the walls of Valetta, Malta.
Sent to an English boarding school at the age of 7, he retaliated by demolishing the heraldic beasts on a great wooden staircase in his frenzied search for (non-existent) buried treasure. Moved to another school, he lived for his summers spent in the Far East. His first brush with mysticism came when a fakir on a breach in Penang tried to teach him, without success, to turn a piece of driftwood into a snake and back again. He left school with enough O and As to get a place at Sandhurst, but refused out of sheer bloody mindedness.
Following a year spent washing planes and plates in Oslo, he took an honours degree at Kingston in English, History and Philosophy. In the summer of his second year, managing again to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he was on board an Italian train hijacked by fascists (or it may have been the red brigade, he wasn't very coherent at the time). Finding himself next to a woman from the Chinese Embassy in London he joined her in singing the Red Flag, survived his own idiocy and later established diplomatic relations on the floor of a train to Copenhagen.
A year later he joined book publishers Benn Brothers, and within 2 years rose by accident to head-up a production department. Still in his early 20s but rapidly developing an ulcer, he resigned and went to Spain, where he wrote a bad, unpublished novel. On his return he worked as a freelancer for Weidenfeld, writing captions, reading manuscripts and editing. Then in the early 80s he was offered the job of editor by Blandford Press and moved from London to Dorset.
During the next few years, while working for BP, he wrote extensively for magazines and newspapers. In 1985 he wrote Mrs T's Bedside Book. Two more books, A Photohistory of the 20th Century and The Royal Bedside Book followed a year later. Mrs T's Election Bedside Book came in 1987. The following year he helped ghost Inside Intelligence, the memoirs of a MI6 man. Returning from a trip to New York, he found the Treasury Solicitor camping on his desk and discovered himself minus his job as publisher of Javelin Books (paperback division of United Newspapers).
He spent the next two years dead for tax reasons.
Eventually he settled on a job as fiction editor for a women's weekly, to which he contributed innumerable stories, before being fired when the company accountant discovered how much he was being paid. A stint as consultant editor at Boxtree followed where he commissioned novelisations of video games and graphic novels of Aliens, Predator, Spiderman, Wolverine and Ghost Rider. He then worked as "men's news editor" for women's glossy New Woman, while writing features for a number of men's magazines including Maxim and reviewing Japanese films for Manga Mania.
He now lives with his son in North London, tries to spend a month each summer at a small house in the mountains in Spain and is currently writing his fourth novel. When not working on books he writes for a number of glossy magazines/papers and designs web sites. He is also working on a TV series.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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