Biography

April 20, 1953 · England, UK

Sebastian Charles Faulks

He worked as a journalist for 14 years before becoming a fulltime novelist.

He was awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queen's 2002 Jubilee Birthday Honors List for his services to literature.

London, England

What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.

[2015] When I last had a job, I spent all the time longing to be released from it so I would have time to write books. My wish was granted in 1991. I have now spent almost a quarter of a century alone in a garret staring at a blank wall and I think it has driven me a bit mad. I've done my stint. I need to have a job again now. I want colleagues, gossip, promotions, lunches and a PAYE packet in a grey windowed envelope, with tax and national insurance deductions already made. So that's my resolution for this year: find a job. I can still write books at night and at the weekend, as I did in the early days. So if anyone has something for a chronically unemployed, middle-aged non-smoker with no qualifications at all, here I am.

[asked in 2022 what his "comfort reading" was] I read in order to be discomfited, or at least to learn something new.