Jonathan Coe

Coe worked across novelist, journalist, biographer, children's writer and writer and 2 further recorded occupations. The registers place that work in satire. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Jonathan Coe studied at Trinity College, King Edward's School and University of Warwick. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are satire. Employment is recorded with University of Warwick. Positions recorded include Booker Prize judge. Works named in the authority record are What a Carve Up! Distinctions recorded are John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, Prix Médicis étranger and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

• Name — Jonathan Coe • Born — 19 August 1961 • Birthplace — Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England • Occupation — Novelist • Period — 1987–present • Genre — Satire • Notable Works — What a Carve Up! (1994); The House of Sleep (1997); The Rotters' Club (2001); Middle England (2019) • Awards — John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Samuel Johnson Prize; Prix Médicis; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Costa Book Award • Website — jonathancoewriter.com

Coe was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, on 19 August 1961 to Roger and Janet (née Kay) Coe. He studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Warwick, where he completed an MA and PhD in English Literature.

Coe has long been interested in both music and literature. In the mid-1980s he played with a band (The Peer Group) and tried to get a recording of his music. He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group, Wanda and the Willy Warmers. He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987. In 1994 his fourth novel What a Carve Up! won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was followed by The House of Sleep, which won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and, in France, the Prix Médicis. As of 2022, Coe has published fourteen novels. Besides novels, Coe has written a biography of the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which D. J. Taylor described in Literary Review as "a deeply unconventional biography," won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005. Also in 2005 Penguin published his "collected shorter prose", a volume consisting of only 55 pages, under the title 9th & 13th. The same collection was published in France in 2012 under the title Désaccords imparfaits. He has written a short children's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and a children's story called The Broken Mirror. Both titles are published in Italy only, as La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012). A handwritten manuscript page from The Rotters' Club was displayed as part of the "Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands" exhibition that ran at the British Library during 2012. Coe was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1996 and has been a jury member at the Venice Film Festival (in 1999, under the chairmanship of Emir Kusturica) and the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2007. In 2012 Coe was invited by Javier Marías to become a duke of the kingdom of Redonda. He chose as his title "Duke of Prunes", after a favourite piece of music by Frank Zappa. Coe read an excerpt of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim to crowds at the Latitude Festival in July 2009. The central character was to be "a product of the social media boom", and "the sort of person with hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage breaks up." Coe's 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize and also won the Costa Book Award in the Novel category.

Music is a constant thread in Coe's work. He played music for years and tried to find a record label as a performer before becoming a published novelist. He had to wait until 2001 to make his first appearance on a record with 9th & 13th (Tricatel, 2001), a collection of readings of his work, set to music by jazz pianist/double bass player Danny Manners and indiepop artist Louis Philippe. Coe is a lifelong fan of Canterbury progressive rock. His novel The Rotters' Club is named after an album by Hatfield and the North. He has contributed to the liner notes for that band's archival release Hatwise Choice. He once said: "I'd love to find a pianist to collaborate with – maybe Alex Maguire, who is now playing with the reformed line-up of Hatfield and the North". In fact, this collaboration did come to fruition, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2009, where Maguire performed a suite of piano pieces to accompany readings from the novel The Rain Before It Falls. Coe has also performed live with flautist Theo Travis. Coe wrote the sleevenotes "Reflections on The High Llamas" for the 2003 compilation of The High Llamas Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals. He has also written lyrics for songs on the albums My Favourite Part of You and The Wonder of It All by Louis Philippe, and Earth to Ether by Theo Travis, for which the vocalist was Richard Sinclair. In 2008 Coe wrote Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains, a 60-minute piece of what he calls "spoken musical theatre", with dialogue to be delivered continuously by three actors over a sequence of songs and instrumentals by The High Llamas. The work was premiered at the Analog Festival in Dublin that summer, and subsequently performed at various venues in the UK and Spain. The most recent performance was as part of the Notes and Letters Festival at Kings Place in London in September 2011, with Henry Goodman in the leading role of Bobby. The piece is inspired by the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens, an East London council estate designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. In March 2011, at the City Winery in New York, Coe took the keyboard solos on a live version of "Nigel Blows A Tune" from the Caravan album In the Land of Grey and Pink, along with the musician/novelist Wesley Stace and his band The English UK.

Coe married Janine McKeown in 1989, and they have two daughters born in 1997 and 2000. In 2009, Coe took part in Oxfam's first annual book festival, "Bookfest". Along with William Sutcliffe, Coe volunteered for the Oxfam Bloomsbury Bookshop in London on Thursday 9 July. Coe and Sutcliffe were each asked to choose a theme, and to find books from the stockroom to set up in the shop's window. Coe chose satire as the theme for his display. He chose books by or about Michael Moore, Bill Hicks, Peter Cook and Steve Bell. He also unearthed a script of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Coe donated a story to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Coe's story was published in the Earth collection. He is a trustee of the charity Cleared Ground Demining, and in spring 2007 visited Guinea-Bissau to write an article about their operations there. In a 2001 newspaper interview, Coe described himself as an atheist.

• The Accidental Woman, Duckworth, 1987 • A Touch of Love, Duckworth, 1989 • The Dwarves of Death, Fourth Estate, 1990 • What a Carve Up!, Viking, 1994 — winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; published in the U.S. as The Winshaw Legacy • The House of Sleep, Viking, 1997 — winner of the Prix Médicis étranger • The Rotters' Club, Viking, 2001 — winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize • The Closed Circle, Viking, 2004 • The Rain Before It Falls, Viking, 2007 • The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Viking, 2010 • Expo 58, Viking, 2013 • Number 11, Viking, 2015 • Middle England, Viking, 2018 • Mr Wilder and Me, Viking, 2020 • Bournville, Viking, 2022 • The Proof of My Innocence, Viking, 2024 • Lessons in Harmony, Viking, forthcoming November 2026

• Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It, London: Bloomsbury, 1991 • James Stewart: Leading Man, London: Bloomsbury, 1994 • Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador, 2004 — winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction

Jonathan Coe was born on 19 August 1961 in Birmingham. Coe held the nationality of United Kingdom. Coe was educated at Trinity College, King Edward's School and University of Warwick. Coe worked as novelist, journalist, biographer and children's writer, and the authority record catalogues a further 3 occupations under the same name, among them writer, satirist and satirical novelist. Coe was active from 1987. Coe held the posts of Booker Prize judge. Coe was employed by University of Warwick. The fields Coe worked in include satire. Coe worked in English.

• La storia di Gulliver, L'espresso 2011 • Lo specchio dei desideri, Feltrinelli 2012

Literary prizes • 1994: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize — for What a Carve Up! • 1995: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger — for What a Carve Up! • 1997: Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Fiction Book — for The House of Sleep • 1998: Prix Médicis étranger — for The House of Sleep • 2001: Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize — for The Rotters' Club • 2004: Premio Literario Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente — for The Rotters' Club • 2005: Samuel Johnson Prize — for Like a Fiery Elephant • 2019: European Book Prize — for Middle England • 2019: Costa Book Award for Novel — for Middle England • 2019: Bauer Ca' Foscari Award at the Incroci di civiltà Festival — for the ensemble of his work Learned offices • 2004: Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres • 2012: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Honorary degrees • 2006: DLitt, University of Birmingham • 2006: DLitt, University of Wolverhampton • DUniv: Birmingham City University