Glen Duncan
British fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a generation of novelists emerge from English universities and regional backgrounds to write in a literary tradition shaped by ambitious, intellectually serious prose. Glen Duncan, born on 17 October 1965 in Bolton, belongs to that generation of British writers who moved from formal education into the wider world of books and, eventually, into fiction of their own.
Duncan was educated at the University of Lancaster and the University of Exeter, two institutions that together gave him a grounding in English-language literary culture. Before establishing himself as a novelist, he worked as a bookseller, a role that kept him directly engaged with the publishing world. Writing in English, he is a British citizen whose fiction includes the novel I, Lucifer, a work that stands as a notable part of his output as a novelist.
I, Lucifer is the work most readily associated with Duncan's name in discussions of his career as a British novelist. His path — from Bolton to two universities, from bookselling to authorship — represents a trajectory shaped by sustained engagement with literature in both its commercial and creative forms. That trajectory, grounded in education at Lancaster and Exeter and practical experience in the book trade, forms the documented outline of his life and work as a writer.
Quotes by Glen Duncan
Glen Duncan's insights on:
As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.
Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.
I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.
The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go.
My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.
My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.
