press biography

Jeff Noon claims that his natural talent was to paint. It was whilst studying A Level Art that he helped found and to appear with Stand and Deliver, a bunch of mad, fellow students putting on multimedia shows in local bars. Jeff would perform one-man shows at these events, ("surreal tragi-comic extravaganzas, done on a Salvador Dali shoestring.") He was also getting involved with various bands, including experimental punk group Manicured Noise, ("That’s OK, nobody else has heard of them either.") He went on to study Combined Arts (Painting and Drama) at Manchester University. In his final year he wrote a play about the aftermath of the Falklands War.

This play, Woundings, went on to win a Mobil Prize and was performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, where Jeff was writer-in-residence for eighteen months. He decided to give up painting and music, and to concentrate purely on playwriting, working mainly on the local fringe theatre scene. To support himself during this period he took a job at Waterstone’s bookshop in Manchester.

It was while he was working in the bookshop, that one of his ex-colleagues (who had set up a small, independent publishing company) asked him to have a go at writing a novel. He did.

The result was Vurt, which won him the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 1994. It is a ground-breaking epic which also won him cult status with a new generation of readers who would normally shun science fiction. Pollen came next, gleaning Noon a comparison to "Ed McBain on Acid" (Independent on Sunday) and the accolade "Philip K Dick for the Nineties" (Mail on Sunday). Automated Alice was a crazed update of Lewis Carroll (whom Jeff claims as a major influence) set in present day Manchester. Nymphomation was a skewed prequel to Vurt, centred around a grotesque lottery competition, and containing elements from the other great influence on his work, Jorge Luis Borges. His latest book, Pixel Juice, is a collection of fifty "avant pulp" stories. Jeff Noon has also won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The film version of his play, Woundings, will be released in 1998, and his own theatre remix of Vurt will be performed at the Contact Theatre in 1999.

Read Jeff's own version of his biography