LIFE AT A GLANCE
BORN
South London 1947
EDUCATED
Attended eight schools in England and in Australia - including Ashlyns, an experimental comprehensive in Hertfordshire - and read English at St Peter's College, Oxford University.
CAREER
After university, taught English at a grammar school and then trained in Movement and Drama at the Laban Centre, London. Worked briefly with a small opera company. Returned to teaching at a college, tutoring English and Drama. Now writes full time.
LIVES
Berkshire, UK. Married - 2 grown-up children
BOOKS
Remake (2024)
Newton's Niece (1994)
Acts of Mutiny (1998)
If the Invader Comes (2001)
His Coldest Winter (2005)
The Icon Painter (2014)
Pharmakon (2015)
AWARDS
Derek Beaven won a Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Newton's Niece, which was also shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book.
Acts of Mutiny shortlisted for both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Encore Award.
If the Invader Comes longlisted for the Booker Prize.
A spine-tingling new novel from the critically acclaimed author of If the Invader Comes and Acts of Mutiny
What do you do when Illusion, Tragedy and Comedy all come at once—and stay overnight!
West London, Summer 1995. The British film industry is at its usual last gasp. Jackie Juste’s successful career on stage and screen has hit the skids due to a strange disorder, an ‘anorexia of the eye, following a fracture of the heart’. Jackie, who requires stage make-up even to see a face in the mirror, has taken Vows of Abstinence: ‘I simply would not whore myself any longer around the scene: stage, movies, anything. After nearly twenty years, I felt sullied by the scripts of a century.’
But chance encounters are about to turn life itself bizarrely performative. As the protagonists of Derek Beaven’s edge-of-the-seat novel criss-cross London to escape the mysterious Dr F (an antagonist hellbent it seems on keeping lovers apart) they enact scenes of extravagant desire and terror, of uncanny mimetic compulsion, in a wealth of fascinating sets and locations—not least, after all the narrative ebbs and flows, in the extraordinary estuary-based denouement to this strikingly original work of gothic romance.
Previous novels by Derek Beaven
‘Magnificent set pieces, a richness of thought, a prodigal and original talent make this a novel worth reading from a writer worth watching.’
Time Out on Newton’s Niece
‘You’ll be lulled by Beaven’s descriptive talent and transported by the novel’s more conventional pleasures—sympathetic characters and an exciting, geopolitical plot.’
Mark Schone New York Times Book Review on Acts of Mutiny
‘Beaven has a gift for creating insistently human individuals who prove to be illuminating under pressure … a fine engagement with the largest and smallest details of what it is to be English.’
Lavinia Greenlaw Times Literary Supplement on If the Invader Comes
‘This is a fine novel that achieves an extraordinary exactitude of feeling matched by a perfect sense of place.’
Jane Housham Guardian on His Coldest Winter
Cover Image by Tom Niven
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What is the truth of the ‘left hand paintings’ produced by the artist, Owen Davy? Why—now that he has moved to a Greek island in order to paint—is his own self-portrait proving so problematic? And what, if cultural and linguistic barriers can be overcome, is to be learned from the local painter of Greek Orthodox icons whom he meets by chance? Owen, writing emails to his gallery owner and friend, Theo, starts to address these questions, looking back on his youth—particularly to an affair with a married woman, Julia, and his subsequent tragicomic exile on the streets of Paris—and to his childhood, with its dark iconography. What emerges is of profound spiritual and artistic consequence, as, with new arrivals on the island and new friendships forged, the novel becomes a remarkable exploration of love. Derek Beaven's THE ICON PAINTER offers a fierce critique of numerous cultural orthodoxies, whilst probing the very roots of art, memory and relationship in strange and moving ways.
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From the disturbing goings-on in a present day London mental hospital, the narrator of this daring and ambitious novel hurtles back through the past to the eighteenth century as Catherine Barton, Isaac Newton's (real-life) niece. What unfolds is a lavish and richly detailed portrait of London at that time, a story full of music and science and politics. Newton's Niece is a book about disorientation, human life as self-experiment and the speeding up of Time; a novel that boldly explores gender and the early feminist struggle.
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Flashes of memory are glittering, dangerous things. Ralph was a young boy when, in 1959, he travelled to Australia on an ocean liner. His voyage charts the courtship between two of the Armorica's passengers: Penny, sailing out to join her husband in Adelaide, and Robert, a young man on his way to work at a satellite tracking station. Beneath them, in the hold, beyond where the dogs and cats and a mynah bird are stowed, squats a sinister cargo, and Ralph, rejected by the ship's children, makes a pact with it.
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Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya, where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phyllis, Clarice’s cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to struggle towards what real manhood might be.
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On Boxing Day 1962 it began to snow, and over the next two months England froze. It was the coldest winter since 1740, a winter full of bizarre details: people drove cars across the Thames; a man resorted to digging up his carrots with a pneumatic drill; a duck found frozen solid was thawed out and brought back to life.
Riding home from London in that first snowfall, on the motorbike he was given for Christmas, seventeen-year-old Alan Rae has a brush with death. Immediately afterwards and still shaken, he meets a girl who will change his life.
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Derek Beaven writes: ‘This collection contains forty-three poems in various formats. Some are substantial or consist of narrative sequences. Others are brief and poignant. There are also many touches of humour. The title PHARMAKON suggests the need for a cure—it’s the original Greek word for a remedy (as in pharmacy, pharmaceutical, of course), and the title poem plays with the idea that poetry is often supposed to be “good for us”. The poems all spring from a period some years ago when I was unwell and in need of a remedy, but they have nothing to do with drugs or medication—because I didn’t take any. They represent, instead, a journey through a poetic landscape where the prospect of healing hangs just out of reach--almost like the grail, perhaps. On the way, we meet a variety of figures: the lady projectionist, the modern-day knight encased in the “wrap-round” steel of his car, the cyclist caught by an ambiguous angel, the tragic dog boy, the patient who invents an alternative body in order to breathe… These are poems that experiment with the possibilities both of subject matter and of form. If some appear dark, they offer, in the end, a message of hope'.
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