Scarlett Thomas Birth:

Scarlett Thomas was born in July of 1972 in London.

Scarlett Thomas Background and Writing:

Scarlett Thomas is the author of the novels Bright Young Things, Going Out, PopCo, The End of Mr. Y, and Our Tragic Universe. She was longlisted for the Orange Prize, shortlisted for the South African Boeke Prize, and included in the Independent on Sunday's list of the UK's 20 best young writers.

Since 2004, she has taught Creative Writing at the University of Kent, where she is also studying for an MSc in Ethnobotony.

From Scarlett Thomas:

I was born in Hammersmith in July 1972 and grew up on a council estate in Barking. I tried writing my first novel - The Disappearing Floor - in 1978, when I was six. It didn't go very well. I remember needing a disappearing floor for my plot (and title) to work, but not being able to figure out how to make this happen and so abandoning my project. I read all the time when I was a kid. All the bad stuff: Enid Blyton, Judy Blume...

When I was 10 I moved to Chelmsford in Essex, where I spent a lot of time listening to Wham!, reading Whizzer and Chips and reading teen SF and books about planets or ponies. A strange set of family puzzles unravelled and the upshot was that I was sent to a boarding school in Hertfordshire for a year and a half where I spent my time listening to Prince and reading Jackie Collins novels alongside Shakespeare. I got expelled from my next school for smoking dope, and then worked as an architects’ assistant for a few months before drifting into waitressing jobs. I was very involved in politics at that point, being a member of the Young Socialists and Anti-Apartheid (and various other things). After I completed my A Levels I took another accidental year off – which included being sacked from a fruit-picking job because I went too slowly – and then went to the University of East London to do Cultural Studies. I graduated with a First in 1995. After a brief period working in documentary production and bartending in the Velvet Underground on Charing Cross Road, I moved to Southend to teach Media Studies. I liked the students but not the job and after a while I handed in my notice and moved to Devon to write.

In Devon I attempted my first novel (Dog and Clowns – still in a drawer somewhere) and, after ringing round randomly, got some interest from an agent. She thought the novel needed some work so being young, impulsive and a bit of an idiot I wrote another one instead – a crime novel that I thought was more likely to be published. I soon found myself in London signing a three-book deal for the Lily Pascale series of novels. Writing these novels was fun, and taught me a lot about plotting, but also showed me that formula fiction is a pretty shallow thing to write and that ‘being published’ is not the same as being a real writer. I had things I really wanted to explore in fiction, so in 1999, in a damp and dingy house in Torquay, I wrote Bright Young Things. I also started writing short fiction. I left my first publisher and went to Fourth Estate. I played lots of videogames in my spare time and, in a resulting bid to get out of the house more during daylight hours, got my dog, Dreamer, in 2000. I then moved to Totnes, where I wrote Going Out. I also began reviewing books for the Independent on Sunday, writing a two-weekly paperback column for a couple of years and also reviewing new fiction and science books...

Read more at Scarlett Thomas’ website.