Profile of Nicholas Shakespeare on Famous Like Me

Nicholas Shakespeare (born 1957) is a British journalist and writer. Born in 1957 to a diplomat, Shakespeare grew up in the Far East and in South America. He was educated at Cambridge and worked as a journalist. From 1989 to 1991 he was literary editor for the The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.

His time in South America is represented in two novels, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989, Somerset Maugham Award) and The Dancer Upstairs (1995, American Library Association Award). Other less well known novels from this period are The Men Who Would Be King (1984), Londoners (1986) and The High Flyer (1993). In 1999 Shakespeare published his biography of Bruce Chatwin to widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the novel Snowleg (2004) and a travel book, In Tasmania (2005).

Shakespeare has also produced two extended biographies for television, one on Bruce Chatwin and the other on actor Dirk Bogarde (Arena 2001, BAFTA Best Documentary Award). The Dancer Upstairs was made into a film in 2002 for which Shakespeare wrote the screenplay and which John Malkovich directed. Shakespeare was nominated as one of Granta's Best of British Young Novelists in 1993 and has written articles for Granta, the London Review of Books and National Geographic among others.

Shakespeare's novels place ordinary people against a background of significant events, as with The Dancer Upstairs, which deals with Abimael Guzmán, leader of Peru's Sendero Luminoso; and Snowleg, set partly during the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic.

External link

• Contemporary Writers biography

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