WHAT WOULD DICKENS WRITE TODAY?

	Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher was born in London and spent most of his childhood in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities and completed his doctoral thesis on 18th century English painting and satire.

His first novel, Other Lulus (1994), set in Vienna, centres on a young girl’s discovery of a family connection with the composer Alban Berg.

Hensher spent six years working as a clerk in the House of Commons, an experience which provided the backdrop to his second novel, Kitchen Venom, a story of murder, secrecy and rent-boys which won the Somerset Maugham Award and sparked controversy when it was published in 1996.

Other novels include Pleasured (1998), set in Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Wall, and The Northern Clemency (2008) shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).

His latest novel, King of the Badgers, which exposes the extraordinary individual lives of a community in a seemingly sleepy English seaside town, was published in March 2011.

His new novel, Scenes from Early Life, a family novel set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh war of independence, is published in the UK by 4th Estate in April 2012.

He is the author of a number of short stories including Dead Languages, which was included by A. S. Byatt in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and The Mulberry Empire (2002), a love story and an account of conflicting imperial ambitions during the first Anglo-Afghan war.

Hensher also wrote the libretto to Thomas Adés’ opera Powder Her Face (1995), based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll, and he regularly writes for newspapers including The Independent, The Spectator and The Mail on Sunday.

In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ and is currently Associate Professor for English at Exeter University.  

Selected Reviews

On “The Northern Clemency”: www.spectator.co.uk
On “The Mulberry Empire”: www.guardian.co.uk
On ”Kitchen Venom”: www.amazon.co.uk