10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Jonathan Coe...
A few things the satirist has (largely) kept under wraps...
- In a recent Guardian interview, he lists the motivating factors in his writing as “force of habit, financial necessity and lack of talent in other areas.”
- In the same interview, he recalls that his favourite books as a child were the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge. “They're set in a posh prep school for boys. It was nothing like my primary school but that didn't bother me at all when I read them. In fact I never noticed it. They made me want to be in that school in the same way that watching Porridge made me want to go to prison.”
- Jonathan once wrote songs for a feminist cabaret group called Wanda and the Willy Warmers.
- He credits his grandfather for getting him into books: “He introduced me to Sherlock Holmes (who I loved) and PG Wodehouse (who I didn't)”.
- Coe’s novel The Rotters' Club is named after an album by mid-Seventies experimental rock band Hatfield and the North.
- To mark the publication of What a Carve-Up! in1994, Penguin printed a special set of playing cards, based on Happy Families, featuring cartoons of the Winshaw family instead of the usual characters.
- He lists the best ever advice he received as coming from novelist Beryl Bainbridge: “[she] told me that I shouldn't be reviewing fiction for the newspapers because she felt there was something wrong about passing public judgment on your fellow writers' work. I ignored her for about five years and then realised I agreed with her. So now I keep my opinions to myself (and reviews, after all, are just opinions) unless I am wildly enthusiastic about something.”
- John Crace’s acerbic ‘Digested Read’ column for The Guardian summed up Coe’s previous novel, The Rain Before It Falls as: “Every picture tells a story. Though not a very interesting one.”
- Other alumni of Jonathan’s school – King Edward’s in Birmingham – include novelist Lee Child, critic Kenneth Tynan, poet EA Houseman, politician Enoch Powell, and former Goodie Bill Oddie.
- In 2009, Coe took part in Oxfam’s annual Bookfest, working in, and assembling a window display for the organisation’s Bloomsbury bookshop. He chose satire as his theme and filled his window with books by or about authors such as Michael Moore, Bill Hicks and Peter Cooke.
