Tom Fleming

Interview: Alexander Masters

Stuart: A Life Backwards was Alexander Masters’s first book. The biography of Stuart Shorter, a ‘thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur’ whom Master befriended while working for a homeless charity, it was funny, moving and pleasingly unworthy. It won the Guardian First Book Award in 2005 and the Hawthornden Prize in 2006. He is now working on a biography of his former landlord, mathematician Simon Norton, and is trying to complete the script for a television adaptation of Stuart, to appear (hopefully) this autumn.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    Follow Us