Nick Hornby
Up Close and Personal with Bestselling Author of High Fidelity
He's also the author of the memoir Fever Pitch, (Which was made into a film in the UK in 1997 and remade in the US in 2005). He wrote Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and The Polysyllabic Spree, and edited the short story collection Speaking with the Angel before donating the proceeds to charity. He's received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award, and the Orange Word International Writers’ London Award 2003.
This former English teacher and pop music critic for The New Yorker seems to make time for everything, including his current endeavor: collaborating with Ben Folds on a 12-song album called "Lonely Avenue." The collaboration seems to be a match made in heaven. Hornby and Folds both tend toward autobiography in their writing, Hornby says, but working together pulls them out of themselves and helps them to think about the world in a new way.
One song on the album, with a demo you can find now on YouTube, is a humorous commentary on Levi Johnston's rude awakening when he discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant, and her mom is in the running for the vice president of the United States. The topic is an interesting choice in light of Hornby's recent book, Slam, his first young adult novel, which tells the story of a young man in a very similar, though a lower-profile, situation.
As Jim Farber of The New York Daily News writes, "It's an ideally animated stage to set Hornby's wide array of characters. Like Elvis Costello, Hornby has an uncanny way of finding the poignancy in ridiculous characters and the flaws in great ones."
Click Here to add Nick Horby to your favorite authors and see what books he recommends.
