Adam Thirlwell is a British novelist born in London in 1978. He is the assistant editor of Areté, a triquarterly art magazine, and a columnist for newspapers Esquire and The Guardian. While studying at New College, Oxford, he received awards for several of his essays and excelled in his final exams. Consequently, he was elected member of the All Souls College, an academic research institution focused on theoretical social and human sciences. As a member, Adam Thirlwell was involved in teaching and following the investigations. In 2003 he published his first book, Politics, and was included in Granta’s top twenty best young novelists list. Politics received major coverage by the media, having been referred to as a “fascinating debut novel” by The Independent, where Math Thorne claimed the novel “deserves your immediate attention”. In 2007, Thirlwell publishes his second book, Míss Herbert, a non-fiction work which was heavily criticized by reviews in The Observer and The Times, and which won the Somerset Maugham Award. Thirlwell's work is made of intriguing ideas and gravitates around the characters and the deconstruction of situations to show that things are not as simple as they seem. Politics does not simply discuss politics; it discusses the emotional and sexual whims of a group of young Londoners. Míss Herbert is not about Miss Herbert, but about style, translation and the novel as an international art from. In 2009 he publishes The Escape, described by Milan Kundera as “a novel where the humor is melancholy, the melancholy mischievous and the talent startling.” His 2012 work Kapow!, is an experimental book produced by Studio Frith and published by Visual Editions. The work was nominated for the annual Design Museum Awards and included in the permanent collection of the Chicago Art Institute. In 2015 he received the Edward Morgan Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently the London editor of The Paris Review.
Adam Thirlwell
Writer