Hawes, James
Entry updated 29 April 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1960- ) UK screenwriter and author whose first novel, the slapdash Satire A White Merc With Fins (1996), stirs a pot of story adjacent to Fantastika but subsides agitatedly. Dead Long Enough (2000) dramatizes death-panic, an abstraction that seems to take literal shape. Hawes of some sf interest for Speak for England (2005), whose protagonist, last survivor of a Reality Show that has climaxed in Papua New Guinea, stumbles into a Zone – almost a Lost World – occupied for decades by survivors of a 1950s plane crash. His attempts to educate them into the realities of twenty-first century Britain provide a Satirical view of past, present, and Brexit to come. Excavating Kafka (2008; vt Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life 2008) is a useful introduction to the work of Franz Kafka. [JC]
James M Hawes
born Gloucestershire: 1960
works (highly selected)
- A White Merc With Fins (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) [hb/Tracey Winwood]
- Dead Long Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000) [pb/]
- Speak for England (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) [hb/Steve Dell]
nonfiction
- Excavating Kafka (London: Quercus, 2008) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (New York: St Martin's Press, 2008) [nonfiction: vt of the above: hb/]
links
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