Kneale, Matthew

(British, 1960– )

For an author with as yet only three novels in print, Matthew Kneale has already made a name for himself as a writer with a breathtakingly exciting approach to the past, and nabbed himself two prestigious literary prizes as well. Sweet Thames was published in 1992, and the next year it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is a fast-paced, gripping and utterly believable adventure story which just happens also to impart a great deal of information about sewers, cholera and the dark side of London in the 1840s. After seven years of writing, Kneale produced the Whitbread Prize-winning English Passengers (2000). Kneale says he loved C. S. Forester and had always wanted to write a seafaring novel—so that's what he did. At the same time he created a Chinese-box world of multi-layered voices, times and histories, that can have the reader laughing at one moment and desolate the next. Travelling between London and Tasmania, deftly detailed, fast and tightly plotted, this novel truly deserved all the acclaim it received.

Andrew Miller, Bernard Cornwell, Rose Tremain  KF