Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976, but his family soon moved to England. He spent his childhood in Norwich and Thetford, in the county of Norfolk. He went on to study media technology and production at the University of Bradford. Some of his early short stories were published in "Granta" magazine, and another story titled "While You Were Sleeping" was broadcast on Radio 4. He soon left Bradford to settle first in Sheffield and then in Nottingham, taking on various jobs to support himself while writing his first novel, "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things," which he completed while living on a houseboat. McGregor quickly caught the attention of literary critics, becoming the youngest author on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. The "Sunday Times" described his book as "a triumphant prose poem of ordinary life," paying tribute to "the remarkable nature of everyday life." It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His second novel, "So Many Ways To Begin," was published in 2006.