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.

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