I began my writing career at the New Musical Express in the 1980s before going to write for a variety of papers and magazines including The Face, Q, The Guardian, The Independent, Arena, GQ.

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I have published four books: Shopping In Space: Essays on Blank American Fiction (Serpent's Tail, 1992), The Priest, They Called Him (Bloomsbury, 1997), Screaming With Joy (Bloomsbury, 1999) and The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness (Picador, 2017).

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A graduate of the Universities of Warwick and Leeds, I was a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and The University of Nottingham. I live in the Beeston area of Nottingham.