D. B. C. Pierre

DBC Pierre was a late surprise or an accident (depending on who you ask), for a bomber-pilot-turned-scientist, and an air-traffic-controller-turned-pianist with an all-female swing band, in Australia in 1961. Barely two years later, Pierre's father (who had christened him Peter, though it didn't stick past his teens) shot a picture of his child in Washington, USA, for the cover of Pierre's first novel, Vernon God Little, which went on to win the Man Booker Prize. Except his father hadn't known where the picture would end up, and it took thirty-six more years for Pierre to write the novel, or to even realise he had to write a novel. In those intervening years he had grown up in Mexico - or had made an unconvincing attempt at it - had lived in half a dozen countries besides, had gotten into trouble and gotten back out of it, had been a cartoonist, a photographer, a designer and filmmaker, had been sniped with a gun by his neighbour (they were friends after that), had virtually died in a terrible car accident, and had been bitten by a vampire bat. And that all generated a pile of observations and feelings. All that combustion has to go somewhere, so it goes into books. Pierre takes special pleasure in breathing life into his writing, all the curious laws of personal physics, of mad contemporary life, that nobody can really explain; and he particularly loves the magical meeting of minds between writer and reader, sharing adventures together in silence. There's a corner on a street at sundown, a spat at a battered table, an epiphany after some dusty caper resolves in one of his works - where he hopes to meet you too.