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Colin Bateman was born in Northern Ireland in 1962 and educated at Bangor Grammar School before joining the County Down Spectator, where he became the deputy editor until 1996. In 1990 he received a Journalist’s Fellowship to Oxford University for his reports from Uganda and has received a Northern Ireland Press Award for his weekly satirical column. He won the Betty Trask Award in 1994.

The story of how Colin Bateman originally came to be published is now infamous. At 17, he left Bangor, the Northern Irish seaside resort where he grew up, and started working on a local newspaper. He then later landed the job of satirical columnist on the ‘County Down Spectator’. Bateman attracted strong responses for his column, and is one of the few people in the world who can claim to have been sued by The Boys Brigade.

Bateman was still working as a journalist when he got the idea for ‘Divorcing Jack’. “It came to me in the bath,” he remembers. “I’d just read a series of detective books which made me realise that instead of trying to write the great classic novel of all time, I should write something quite simple.”

Many rejections later he was discovered in the slush pile of unsolicited material by HarperCollins‘Publishers’, and the rest they say ‘is history’.

Bateman is a prolific writer. In June, following the publication of ‘Shooting Sean’, HarperCollins publishes ‘Wild About Harry’ to tie-in with the general release of the film for which he wrote the screenplay, and which has also received rave reviews at the London Film Festival. And in April another Bateman original TV screen play, ‘Murphy’s Law’ goes into production starring James Nesbitt.

 

A selection of his novels can be seen below. To read about, or purchase any of the novels below please click on the image.