Profile of Nick Hornby on Famous Like Me

Nick Hornby (born 17 April 1957) is an English novelist and essayist who lives in Highbury, Islington (London). He frequently touches upon obsessive behavior (usually male, and related to two of his own interests: sports and music), and writes in what some say is a funny, entertaining style, containing hidden depths.

Biography

Hornby was educated at Maidenhead Grammar School and studied English at Jesus College, Cambridge. He started his career as a teacher, then left to work as a freelance journalist and later as a novelist.

Hornby built his name first with Fever Pitch (1992) a memoir of his lifelong support of Arsenal F.C. That book, and his first and second novels, High Fidelity (1995) and About a Boy (1998), draw on the author's life experience and find particular appeal among men in their twenties and thirties.

In 1999 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

How to be Good (2001) marked a shift for Hornby in that it was his first novel to feature a female narrator. 2005 saw the publication of his most recent novel, A Long Way Down, and of Otherwise Pandemonium, which contains two short stories and is part of Penguin Books' 70th anniversary Pocket Penguin collection.

Hornby has also written essays on various aspects of popular culture, and in particular has become something of an authoritative literary voice for pop music and mix tape enthusiasts. In addition to writing music reviews for publications such as The New Yorker, Hornby published the 2003 anthology 31 Songs (known in the United States as Songbook), a collection of essays on selected popular songs and (more often) the specific emotional resonance they carry for him. He also began writing a book review column, "Stuff I've Been Reading," for the monthly magazine The Believer; several of these articles are collected in The Polysyllabic Spree (2004).

Hornby has also edited two sports-related anthologies, My Favourite Year and The Picador Book of Sports Writing, as well as the short-fiction collection Speaking with the Angel, to which he contributed the story "NippleJesus."

Film adaptations

Several of Hornby's books have made the jump from page to screen. Hornby wrote the screenplay for the first, a 1997 British adaptation of Fever Pitch, starring Colin Firth. It was followed in 2000 by High Fidelity, starring John Cusack; this adaptation was notable in that the action was shifted from London to Chicago. After this success, About a Boy was quickly picked up, and released in 2002, starring Hugh Grant. An Americanized Fever Pitch, in which Jimmy Fallon plays a hopelessly addicted Boston Red Sox fan who tries to reconcile his love of the game with that of his girlfriend (Drew Barrymore), was released in 2005. It appears likely that A Long Way Down will also be adapted; Johnny Depp purchased film rights to the book before it was even published.

Bibliography

Novels

• (1995) High Fidelity ISBN 0140293469
• (1998) About a Boy ISBN 0141007338
• (2002) How to Be Good ISBN 0140287019
• (2005) A Long Way Down ISBN 0670888249

Non-fiction

• (1992) Fever Pitch ISBN 014029344
• (2003) 31 Songs (aka Songbook) ISBN 0141013400
• (2004) Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree ISBN 1932416242

Anthologies edited

• (1993) My Favourite Year: A Collection of Football Writing ISBN 0753814412
• (1996) The Picador Book of Sportswriting ISBN 0330331337
• (2000) Speaking with the Angel (2000) ISBN 0140296786

Filmography

• 1997 Fever Pitch — directed by David Evans
• 2000 High Fidelity — directed by Stephen Frears
• 2002 About a Boy — directed by Chris and Paul Weitz
• 2005 Fever Pitch — directed by Farrelly brothers

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