About

Neil Ferguson. Nashville, Tennessee. 1985

Nashville, Tennessee. 1985

I write write novels, short fiction and poetry.

My early fiction was whacky stuff for the British science fiction magazine Interzone.    In those days Interzone was a home  for writers such as GJ Ballard, Angela Carter, Michael Morcock.  Of my first novel Double Helix Fall the critic John Clute, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, said:

‘This isn’t one of Philip K Dick’s best novels, but it is by no means one of his worst. It is a Philip Dick Novel’.

Once I had got Philip K Dick out of my system, my work became less whacky.  In 1985 the London publisher, Hamish Hamilton, paid for me to return the United States to complete my second book, a collection of short fiction,  Bars of America.  Several of these stories were written in a style to which Granta, a decade later, would call Dirty Realism.

Neil Ferguson, Shepherds Bush, London. 1957.

Shepherds Bush, London. 1957.

Born in 1947, I grew up in West London.  After a spell in a Church Army Children’s Home I attended various London Bash Street schools and, finally, Holland Park Comprehensive.  Although I failed my 11 Plus exam and English Language O Level I nevertheless ended up at university where I studied Dante, Boccaccio, Montale and Italo Calvino. (I made tea and buttered toast for Italo when he visited the university to talk about his new book, Cosmicomichi, and I translated his talk for him.)  My childhood is evoked in my non-fiction novel Taller Today.

I have spent most of his life in an area of London local people call Ladbroke Grove or North Kensington, but which celebs and the press refer to as Notting Hill.  Mine is the Notting Hill of Absolute Beginners and 10 Rillington Place, rather than that of the eponymous movie.

Eschewing the temptation of self-imitation, I have always made sure that each of my books is a departure in style and content from my previous work.  I take the view that every novel ought to ask questions of the form of the Novel, particularly of the British Realist Novel. My third novel, English Weather, for example, is a  multi-voiced narrative told in a reversal of time, such that death precedes birth.