Paul Pickering

Pickering started his career as a journalist but wrote his first novel, Wild About Harry, after an assignment to Paraguay to find the war criminal Josef Mengele. The novel was both a critical and popular success and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, Perfect English, about a young "Internationalista" in Nicaragua, was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and became another best seller. His next novel, The Blue Gate of Babylon, also long listed for the Man Booker Prize, was also a best-seller and was chosen by The New York Times as a notable book of the year and Pickering was chosen as one of WH Smith's top ten young British novelists. Charlie Peace, his next controversial novel about the second coming of Christ in modern times, drew the quote from J. G. Ballard that Pickering was 'a truly subversive author' and called the decision not to publish the book in Britain 'pure censorship'. The controversy led The Sunday Times to dub him 'the de facto Norman Mailer of the British Literati'. After a near fatal stabbing in the Groucho Club in 1997 that blinded him in one eye, Pickering went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the last stages of the civil war, and produced The Leopard's Wife to favourable reviews. He then went to Afghanistan for his most recent novel Over the Rainbow. Pickering has written short stories, poems and articles for publications all over the world. His work has been compared to that of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

Pickering married Alice (née Beckett) in 1983 in Mahé in the Seychelles. They have one daughter, Persephone, born 1993.

Paul Pickering (born 9 May 1952) is a British novelist and playwright.