'Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury. Who would have thought the square mile around Arsenal's stadium could be a suitable surrogate for the whole wide world?'
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Zadie Smith, Time





​Nick Hornby was born on 17 April 1957 in the town of Red Hill, Surrey. Shortly after birth, Hornby's family moved to the riverside town of Maidenhead in Berkshire because of his father, Sir Derick Hornby's, work. His father, Sir Derek, was a self-made man who ended up as chairman of Rank Xerox. As a boy, Derick Hornby was a "bright lad who benefited from a government scheme to send able boys from poor homes to public school".Hornby's mother had a day job, this meant that much of his childhood Hornby was alone. Hornby's solution to this was taking "solace in the public library, throwing himself at first into the Jennings football series and Richmal Crompton's Just William stories" as he recalls in an interview in 2009. It was Maidenhead where Nick Hornby learned to write and it is where his passion for literature arose.

When Hornby was 11 years old, his parents divorced and his father began taking him to watch the North London Premier League club Arsenal during their visits. He ultimately developed into a loyal fan of the team. His books emphasize his love for football and Arsenal with his constant refereces back to the great game itself, "fever pitch"; arguably Hornby's most successful and greatest book is based around football and Arsenal; it helped to make football trendy and explain its appeal to the soccerless.

Hornby's life after his parents divorced was very disjointed, he describes life at home as being very "normal" an then his life with his dad being "exotic" due to the constant travelling between France, England, America and having to adapt to a new family that his father had joined.

Hornby attended Maidenhead grammar school where he read English, from there, with an obvious gift for English, progressed to the University of Cambridge where he studied English.

From a very young age, Hornby had acquired a very strong belief and understanding of how people should act in life, what they should do and how they should live their life. At Cambridge Hornby felt like an outsider, he hadn't always felt an outsider, he was pretty happy growing up in Maidenhead - it may have been, what he called "a soulless, insular place", but he felt confident and able within its confines and surrounding. As he recalls in an interview for the Guardian Newspaper, "I felt that I was surrounded by fellow students stuffed with certainties and an unquestioning sense of entitlement, and he shrank in the face of such bluster." Hornby still holds this strong view today however he now holds the view that he secretly wanted to be a winner like the others at Cambridge but he just didn't want to believe it. Hornby declares that studying English at Cambridge was useless, he didn't work most of the time, and when he did, "it sounded like a bad university essay".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A newly-established Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University was launched on 17 September by the best-selling novelist and parent of a child with autism, Nick Hornby.





 



After Cambridge, Hornby decided to become an English teacher at a comprehensive school while reviewing for magazines including Time Out and the Literary Review. He dropped out of teaching to become a screenwriter and during his time as a screenwriter he wrote Fever Pitch which became a publishing sensation. During this time he also met his first wife Virginia and they had a son named Danny. From an early age, it was evident that Danny had problems and the diagnosis of autism quickly followed. "Having Danny is like the stress of having a newborn permanently – that kind of disruption with a newborn's first weeks, and there's no change to that," Hornby explained a few years ago. He speaks to Virginia about Danny every day, but the couple are now divorced. The pressure of looking after their son was, Hornby concedes, "a huge part" of the marriage breakdown: "It exposes immediately whatever flaws there are." 

Since then, Hornby has had two sons with Amanda Posey, born in 2003 and 2005.

Hornby was close to going back to an unhappy life of teacher to supply the income for his family however he had been working on some essays and books that he thought he could publish; his first book, a series of critical essays on American novelists, was published in 1992. Fever Pitch, his memoir of a life devoted to Arsenal football club, was published in 1992. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and was adapted as both a play and a film, the latter starring Colin Firth. This was his breakthrough book and just from this piece of writing, cemented himself into the top authors category at that time.

His fiction continued to explore male obsessions, crises and weaknesses. His first novel, "High Fidelity (1995), is the story of an obsessive record collector and list-maker, and was adapted as a film in 2000 starring John Cusack. His second novel, About a Boy (1998), focuses on the growing relationship between 30-something Will Freeman and Marcus, a 12-year-old boy. A film version, starring Hugh Grant, premiered in 2002." His novel, How to Be Good written in 2001, explores contemporary morals, marriage and parenthood. It won the WH Smith Award for Fiction in 2002.  31 Songs (2003), celebrates 31 songs of great significance to the author, and A Long Way Down (2005), was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award and for a 2006 Commonweath Writers Prize. His latest novel "Juliet Naked" which was released in 2009. It is a novel about rock stars, relationships and last chances the book is much like his previous book "high fidelity".

























'I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself'









Recently Hornby has been working on screenplays - an adaptation of a Lynn Barber memoir, a romantic comedy he's been writing for years with Emma Thompson, both of them likely to go into production shortly, and a stalled film script of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. In a recent Spanish interview, Hornby gave his view on today's type of writing "This idea that 'literature' can somehow survive without a contemporary readership is new and I suspect wrong. There is a particularly dreary kind of literary writing which quite clearly aims for posterity – I'm not interested in reading it and I'm certainly not interested in writing it." This quote typifies the strong opinion Hornby has had all his life about ideas that he believes in.

Today, in 2012, an average day, according to penguin books, for Hornby would be; arriving at his office round the corner from my home between 9:30 and 10 a.m. Smoke a lot, write in horrible little two-and-three sentence bursts, with five-minute breaks in between. Check for emails during each break, and get irritated if there aren't any. Go home for lunch.  Pick his son at 3:30. "It's all pretty grim! And so dull!" Hornby declares.





























"I wouldn't call it depression now. It's just a sort of strain of English miserablism, where you know everything is crap and everyone who pretends it isn't is kidding themselves. Yeah, this is the best it will ever get."- Hornby on life out of depressive time with autistic son.









 References



http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/nov/21/observer-profile-nick-hornby-dave-eggers - date accessed: 12/05/12- date of article: 3/4/2009



http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/13/nick.hornby  - date accessed: 11/05/12- date of article: 3/4/2009

http://readers.penguin.co.uk/nf/shared/WebDisplay/0,,201227_1_10,00.html  - date accessed: 29/05/12- date of article: 3/4/2009

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0_1000015368,00.html?sym=QUE- date accessed: 29/05/12- date of article: 5/4/2009

​http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/13/nick.hornby- date accessed: 21/05/12- date of article​: 3/4/2009

http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/nickhornby/aboutnick/index.html- date accessed: 29/05/12- date of article: 2/4/2009

http://literature.britishcouncil.org/nick-hornby - date accessed: 29/05/12- date of article: 3/4/2009

http://contemporarylit.about.com/cs/authors/p/hornby.htm - date accessed: 29/05/12- date of article: 3/4/2009











 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

























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