James Lasdun

James Lasdun (born 1958) is a British writer who has lived in the United States since 1986. His father was the architect Denys Lasdun.

Life and career

Lasdun was born in London, the son of Susan (Bendit) and Denys Lasdun. Lasdun has written two novels, , a New York Times Notable Book, and , which was an Economist Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. He has published four collections of short stories, including , the title story of which was adapted for film by Bernardo Bertolucci as in 1998. His latest collection was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the , the , the and the .

With Jonathan Nossiter, Lasdun co-wrote the film Sunday in 1997, based on his story , winning both the Best Feature Award and the Waldo Salt Best Screenplay Award at Sundance. Together they also wrote the next Nossiter fiction feature film Signs and Wonders in 2000 selected for the official selection of the 50th Berlin International Film Festival in 2000.

Lasdun has written four books of poetry, one of which, Landscape with Chainsaw, was a finalist for the T S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also selected as a TLS International Book of the Year.

His reviews and essays have appeared in , , the and .

With his wife, Pia Davis, Lasdun has written two guidebooks dedicated to the combined pleasures of walking and eating: one in Tuscany and Umbria, the other in Provence.

He has taught creative writing at Princeton, NYU, the New York State Writers' Institute, the New School, Columbia University and Bennington College.

In 2013, he confessed that he was the Reader who turned down the Jane Somers novel (pseudonymously written by Doris Lessing, Nobel laureate for Literature) submitted to Jonathan Cape publishers, in the New Yorker "Page Turner" blog 23 July 2013.

Critical appraisals of his work include reviews by James Wood in the Guardian and by Gabriele Annan in the New York Review of Books.

Bibliography

Short stories

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Poetry

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Novels

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Nonfiction

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Miscellaneous

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Honors

• Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize (short stories)
• Recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry
• Winner (with Jonathan Nossiter) of the Sundance Waldo Salt Best Screenplay Award for the film Sunday
• Winner (1999) of the London Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition
• Winner of the inaugural BBC National Short Story Award (May 2006) for his story An Anxious Man.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature