Julian Gough

JULIAN GOUGH BIOGRAPHY

Julian Gough was born in London. He grew up in Ireland. He lives in Berlin. And he writes novels.

While studying philosophy at university in Galway, he began singing with the underground, and very literary, rock band Toasted Heretic. They played London, Paris and New York, released four albums, and had a top ten hit in Ireland in 1991 with “Galway and Los Angeles”, a song about not kissing Sinead O’Connor.

Gough’s first novel, Juno & Juliet was published in 2001. Set in Galway, it stars identical twin sisters in their first year away from home, and is about Life! Love! Literature! His second novel, Jude, stars an orphan with two penises, and is about everything else. It's a rather unusual novel, and is being published in a rather unusual way, starting with Jude: Level 1. Levels 2 and 3 will follow in 2008 and 2009, before all three levels of Jude are published in a handsome hardback some time in the glorious future.

Jude: Level 1 is part of a hugely ambitious attempt to write the funniest serious novel of the new millennium. Gough believes, along with the Greeks at the time of Aristophanes, that tragedy is the merely human view of life: comedy is superior, being the Gods’ view. He also believes that the West, since the Renaissance, has tended to over-value the tragic.

Thus Jude, seven years in the writing, turned out to be so magnificently original that every major publisher in Britain (after likening Gough to Beckett, Joyce, Swift and Voltaire), rejected it (or, in at least one case, were blocked from bidding for it by their marketing and sales department, who said it was too weird, and they didn't know how to sell it. A tremendous compliment from the publishers of Jordan's novels, but you can't eat a compliment.) In the meantime Julian was evicted from his house in Galway for non-payment of rent, and ended up living for nothing in a delightful house in the French countryside, a brisk 8 kilometre walk from the nearest shop. This, combined with being too broke to smoke or drink himself to death, has had the happy side effect of making him perhaps the fittest author of his generation.

After spending a blissful and penniless summer in France, but rather worried about facing winter with such a small wood-burning stove, Julian was relieved when Old Street Publishing, a new company run by a better and braver class of editor, snapped up Jude with cries of joy. Old Street are now, in fairytale fashion, being rewarded for their courage. The prologue to Jude: Level 1, a story called "The Orphan and the Mob" won the 2007 BBC Short Story Prize, the biggest short story prize on earth. It’s been broadcast twice on the BBC, published in the prestigious National Short Story Prize 2007 book, and generally acclaimed. Julian can afford to pay rent again, though not in Ireland. Or England. (He’s now in Berlin. It’s cheap).

He blogs on this very website, and lazily copies the same blog to his tacky myspace site.