Jonathan Coe (born August 19, 1961) is an English author who writes novels and other works. His writing often focuses on political topics, but he uses humor and satire to explore these serious issues. For example, his book What a Carve Up! (1994) is based on a 1960s spoof horror film with the same name. The story takes place during a time when the UK's resources were divided under the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Early life
Coe was born on August 19, 1961, in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. His parents were Roger and Janet Coe, who was born as Kay. He attended King Edward's School in Birmingham and later studied at Trinity College in Cambridge. He taught at the University of Warwick and earned his Master's and Doctoral degrees in English Literature.
Career
Coe has always been interested in music and literature. In the mid-1980s, he played in a band called The Peer Group and tried to record his music. He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group named Wanda and the Willy Warmers.
He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987. In 1994, his fourth novel, What a Carve Up!, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. This was followed by The House of Sleep, which received the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and the Prix Médicis in France. As of 2022, Coe has written fourteen novels.
In addition to novels, Coe wrote a biography of the British novelist B. S. Johnson titled Like a Fiery Elephant. This book was called "a deeply unconventional biography" by D. J. Taylor in Literary Review and won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005. In 2005, Penguin published a collection of Coe’s shorter prose titled 9th & 13th, which contains only 55 pages. The same collection was published in France in 2012 under the title Désaccords imparfaits.
Coe also wrote a children’s adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and a children’s story titled The Broken Mirror. Both books are published only in Italy, with the titles La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012).
A handwritten page from The Rotters’ Club was displayed in the "Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands" exhibition at the British Library in 2012.
Coe served as a judge for the Booker Prize in 1996 and was a jury member at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 (under the leadership of Emir Kusturica) and the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2007.
In 2012, Coe was invited by Javier Marías to become a duke of the fictional kingdom of Redonda. He chose the title "Duke of Prunes," named after a favorite song by Frank Zappa.
In July 2009, Coe read an excerpt from The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim at the Latitude Festival. The main character in the book was described as "a product of the social media boom" and "a person with many Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage ends."
Coe’s 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize and the Costa Book Award in the Novel category.
Film and TV adaptations
Both What a Carve Up! (1994) and The Rotters' Club (2001) were adapted as drama serials for BBC Radio 4. What a Carve Up! was adapted by David Nobbs. The Rotters' Club was adapted for television by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and broadcast on BBC Two in January–February 2005. The Dwarves of Death (1990) was filmed as Five Seconds to Spare in 1999, for which Coe himself co-wrote the screenplay.
The Very Private Life of Mister Sim, a French film based on The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, was directed by Michel Leclerc and produced by Delante Cinema and Kare Productions. It was released on 16 December 2015.
Musical collaborations
Music plays an important role in Coe's work. He played music for many years and tried to find a music company as a performer before becoming an author. He waited until 2001 to appear on a record called 9th & 13th (Tricatel, 2001), which includes readings of his writing set to music by jazz pianist and double bass player Danny Manners and indiepop artist Louis Philippe.
Coe has always been a fan of Canterbury progressive rock. His novel The Rotters' Club is named after an album by the band Hatfield and the North. He also wrote notes included with that band's special release of old music called Hatwise Choice. He once said he would like to work with pianist Alex Maguire, who is now part of the reformed version of Hatfield and the North. This happened in 2009 at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where Maguire played piano pieces to accompany readings from the novel The Rain Before It Falls. Coe has also performed live with flautist Theo Travis.
Coe wrote the notes on the album covers titled "Reflections on The High Llamas" for the 2003 compilation The High Llamas Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals. He also wrote lyrics for songs on the albums My Favourite Part of You and The Wonder of It All by Louis Philippe, and Earth to Ether by Theo Travis, where the singer was Richard Sinclair.
In 2008, Coe created Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains, a 60-minute piece he calls "spoken musical theatre." This work includes continuous dialogue from three actors over a series of songs and instrumentals by The High Llamas. It was first performed at the Analog Festival in Dublin that summer and later shown in the UK and Spain. The most recent performance was at the Notes and Letters Festival at Kings Place in London in September 2011, with Henry Goodman playing the main character, Bobby. The piece was inspired by plans to tear down Robin Hood Gardens, an East London housing project designed by Alison and Peter Smithson.
In March 2011, at the City Winery in New York, Coe played the keyboard parts on a live version of "Nigel Blows A Tune" from the Caravan album In the Land of Grey and Pink, along with musician and author Wesley Stace and his band The English UK.
Personal life
Coe married Janine McKeown in 1989. They have two daughters who were born in 1997 and 2000.
In 2009, Coe participated in Oxfam's first annual book festival called "Bookfest." Along with William Sutcliffe, Coe volunteered at the Oxfam Bloomsbury Bookshop in London on Thursday, July 9. Coe and Sutcliffe were each asked to choose a theme and select books from the shop's stockroom to display in the shop window. Coe chose satire as his theme. He selected books by or about Michael Moore, Bill Hicks, Peter Cook, and Steve Bell. He also found a script from Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.
Coe donated a story to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, which includes four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Coe's story was included in the Earth collection.
He is a trustee of the charity Cleared Ground Demining. In spring 2007, he visited Guinea-Bissau to write an article about the charity's work there.
In a 2001 newspaper interview, Coe described himself as an atheist.