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.
Newton’s Niece looks, at first glance, like a straightforward historical novel. Every detail in it that could be researched was researched, and I made it a matter of conscience not to invent or rearrange any known historical fact or document. Careful reading, however, shows that it’s actually an act of memory modelled on the eighteenth century style of the Female Picaresque. Of course, for anyone’s memory to stretch back three centuries to the origins both of the Novel and modern Science must surely require a little Sci-Fi input—but I used it sparingly and for that purpose only. So Newton’s Niece isn’t a Sci-Fi novel, either. I wanted to write an account of real events that would fit all the known details but none of the dominant ‘male’ interpretations of them. By taking the astonishing historical fact that Isaac Newton really did have with him in London a figure as potentially disruptive to his hard-line intellectual project as his pretty niece, Catherine Barton, I wanted to show that the Novel (Fiction) could challenge Science (Fact) on its own terms. (That was one of the purposes of the book, at least!) So Newton’s Niece is a novel that seeks to read Science’s foundation myth ‘against the grain’.
‘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 (London)
‘An exuberant debut, ambitious and questing.’ Observer
‘One is in no doubt that one is in the hands of a truly remarkable and gifted writer … This endlessly fascinating and inventive novel is funny and profound by turns.’ Hampstead & Highgate Express
‘An important and original writer … a wonderfully capacious and vivid book’ Hilary Mantel
‘A bold flourish of a debut, taking names from the footnotes as well as the pages of history and making them live and breathe.’ The Times
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