D. J. Taylor is a writer and critic. He is the author of seven novels: Great Eastern Land (1986); Real Life (1992); English Settlement (1996); Trespass (1998), The Comedy Man (2001), Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006) and Ask Alice (2009).
His books of non-fiction include After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 (1993); A Vain Conceit: British fiction in the 1980s (1989), and Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
He is also well known for his biographies: Thackeray (1999); and Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award.
D.J. Taylor's
Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. His other works of non-fiction include
Thackeray (1999),
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 (2007),
The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016) and
Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 (2019). He has written a dozen novels, including
English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize,
Trespass (1998) and
Derby Day (2011), both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent books are the short story collection
Stewkey Blues (2022) and
Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews 2010-2022 (2023). His journalism appears in a variety of publication on both sides of the Atlantic, including the
Times Literary Supplement, the
Guardian, the
New Criterion, the
Critic and
Private Eye. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.
