Profile: stephen hawley

About This Author

As with the majority of writers, the most interesting events in my life take place on paper. In my everyday existence, I am currently single and working a white collar job in NE England while hoping for that elusive publishing break. Not that this makes a great deal of difference to my writing. My books aren't, in the strictest sense of the word, autobiographical. Straight transposition of personal experience doesn't work for me - the writing didn't take flight until I started concentrating on characters or subjects that interested me, rather than dwelling on my own experience. In another sense, however, everything a writer produces is an expression of his character and is therefore autobiographical. All my main characters embody aspects of my personality or life experience, although this transference was largely an unconscious process, at least at first. The fact that my protagonists include a large proportion of gangsters, sociopaths and sex workers probably says more about my inner life than I'd care to admit in polite society. As for my literary tastes, I went through contrasting SF and kitchen-sink phases in my teens (Orwell's probably the only writer to span both genres), before developing a heavy Beat habit in my early-twenties - I'm proud to say that I discovered Bukowski when he was still being sold in cheap paperback editions as a pornographer rather than being published as the hipster icon he is today. I also underwent my 'meaning of life' trip at this point, struggling through everything from Camus and Sartre to William Blake, with a few diverting sidetrips into everything from Zen to Surrealism, a journey into youthful pretension that still makes me cringe at the memory. Nowadays, I veer between being a middle-aged curmudgeon (my life shows increasing parallels to Philip Larkin's, which rather disturbs me) and an overgrown schoolboy, re-reading Kipling, Stevenson and Jack London, alongside early Len Deighton and Ian Fleming: there's always been an inner tension between the prissy adult intellectual and the 15-year old fanboy, the adolescent goof who enjoys ghosts and gangsters and cowboys and space monsters, preferably all within the same narrative. I also appreciate good short stories - Saki, Hemingway, Maugham, M.R. James - and have always been a big fan of the U.S. hardboiled school, from Dashiell Hammett to George Pelecanos. Speaking of Pelecanos, you may have realised that he's the only living novelist I've so far mentioned (is Len Deighton still with us?). Unfortunately, I've reached that age where all the then-contemporary writers I grew up reading have died, from Dick and Ballard on the one hand to Amis Sr. and George MacDonald Fraser on the other - even Iain Banks has dropped off the twig. The only current writer I keep abreast of is William Gibson, alas. But enough about me. Check out the books. Because that's what you're here for, right?