Biography
Grimwood was born in Valletta, Malta, grew up in Britain, Southeast Asia and Norway in the 1960s and 1970s. He studied at Kingston College, then worked in publishing and as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent. He now lives in London and Winchester and is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, with a son, Jamie, from a previous marriage.
Much of his early work can be described as post-cyberpunk. He won a British Science Fiction Association award for Felaheen in 2003, was short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Pashazade the year before, and won the 2006 BSFA award for Best Novel with End of the World Blues. He was short-listed for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2002 for Pashazade. His fourth book is loosely based on Stanley Weyman's Victorian novel Under the Red Robe. End of the World Blues was also short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C Clarke Award. The following were nominated in the SF novel category in the Locus Awards - Felaheen, The Third Arabesk, 2004; Stamping Butterflies, 2005; 9Tail Fox, 2006; End of the World Blues, 2007
Grimwood's work tends to be of a quasi-alternate history genre. In the first four novels, set in the 22nd century, the point of divergence is the Franco–Prussian War of 1870, where Grimwood posits a reality where Napoléon III's France defeats Otto von Bismarck's Prussia, causing the German Empire never to form and the Second French Empire never to collapse. In the Arabesk trilogy, the point of divergence is in 1915, with Woodrow Wilson brokering an earlier peace so that World War I barely expanded outside of the Balkans; the books are set in a liberal Islamic Ottoman North Africa in the 21st century, mainly centring around El Iskandriya (Alexandria). By contrast, there is little in Stamping Butterflies, 9tail Fox or End of the World Blues to suggest that the books are not set in our reality.
The Fallen Blade is the first of three novels set in an alternative early-15th century featuring Tycho, fallen angel and assassin, at the Venetian court, in a Venice where Marco Polo's family have been hereditary dukes for five generations and the Mongol emperor Tamberlaine has conquered China, making him the most powerful ruler in the world. The second novel in the Assassini series, The Outcast Blade was published in 2012, with the third The Exiled Blade due in Spring 2013. The novels take as a template sequences and tropes from Shakespeare's plays Othello, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
Grimwood was guest of honour at Novacon in 2003, at Kontext (in Uppsala, Sweden) in 2008, and at Eastercon LX (the 60th British National Science Fiction Convention) in 2009.
He was a judge for the 2010 Arthur C Clarke Award presented to China Mieville for The City & the City. He was also a judge for the 2011 award presented to Lauren Beukes for Zoo City.
In Summer 2013, Grimwood will release his first literary novel entitled The Last Banquet, described as 'the memoir of Jean-Marie d’Aumout, orphan, military cadet, aristocrat, gastronome and owner of the finest menagerie in France outside of Versailles.' The novel will be published in the UK by Canongate under the pen name Jonathan Grimwood.
Read more about this topic: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
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