James Meek
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James Meek
Award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist
James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is his fourth novel. His previous book, The People's Act of Love (2005), won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
He has published two collections of short stories, Last Orders and The Museum Of Doubt, and contributed to the acclaimed Rebel Inc anthologies The Children Of Albion Rovers and The Rovers Return.
He has worked as a journalist since 1985, and his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In the autumn of 2001 he reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan on the war against the Taliban and the liberation of Kabul.
James Meek's third novel, The People's Act of Love is set in a small town in Siberia in 1919, during the Russian civil war. The characters and drama, though, are far removed from the stock literary gallery of reds and whites. Amongst his drammatis personae are Christian castrates, cannibals and a division of the Czech army stranded behind in a war that should, by rights, have released them at this stage.