Warwick Collins - Other Careers

Other Careers

After leaving university, Collins became a yacht designer and invented and patented the tandem keel, which was conceived to create high performance at low draft, but which also remains one of the radical keels in the America's Cup. He continued his interest in yacht design with an innovation in hull design called the Universal Hull. This fused together two classic hull types (the long, thin, easily-driven hull and the beamy commodious hull) in a form which yielded the chief virtues of both types of hull. The two hulls are joined above the waterline by a ledge which also acts as a spray ledge. The resulting shape is easily driven because of the long, thin underwater shape but enjoys the accommodation space (above the waterline) of a beamy hull.

In the 1990s Collins turned to fiction, publishing three sailing novels and then a series of more wide-ranging novels, including two (The Rationalist and The Marriage of Souls) which are set in 18th century Lymington. He published ten novels until his death.

Collins's political views are liberal and libertarian, but (in 1979) he was asked by Keith Joseph to join a Conservative party think tank chaired by John Hoskyns (who became Chief Political Adviser to Margaret Thatcher) to work on issues such as privatisation. Collins, though left of centre politically, has always believed, in common with "classical liberals" such as Gladstone, that the free market is a superior means of distributing wealth than the state.

Collins's political views manifested themselves in his novel Gents (1996) which has recently been republished by The Friday Project, and was reviewed as an all-time classic in the Times (8 September 2007). Gents, which describes the lives of three West Indian immigrants who run a public urinal in London, is considered to be a leading fiction on tolerance. Collins claims it was stimulated in part by his memories of apartheid when he lived as a child in South Africa.

Collins's other fictions include the somewhat luridly entitled Fuckwoman, a spoof on the superhero genre which details the adventures of a feminist vigilante who hunts down men who commit crimes against women. Set in Los Angeles, it also satirises the movie industry, contrasting Hollywood's emphasis on the image over reality. It has been published in French, German and Italian translations and recently in English as F-Woman.

His most recent novel is The Sonnets, a fictional account of William Shakespeare's life from 1592–4, when the London theatres were closed by threat of plague, during which time many scholars believe that the main body of Shakespeare's sonnets were written.

Warwick Collins maintained an occasional blog at "www.publicpoems.com".