An award-winning writer and editor
Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for “Briar Road,” and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Tell is his twelfth novel.
Jonathan Buckley’s Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people’s. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy.
Calling his work “captivating,” John Banville has asked: “Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known?”
Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.
Even at their most thrillerish, Jonathan Buckley’s novels defy convention… If Buckley’s readership has remained small as a result, it is no reflection of the quality of the work. Over a career spanning more than 25 years, he has written with reliable ingenuity, eschewing traditional narrative structures not out of obtuseness but out of a genuine scepticism of what they can achieve.
Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.
A quietly brilliant writer, almost eccentric in his craftsmanship.
Few writers manage to conjure such raw unease as Jonathan Buckley ... completely compelling.
Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known?
An exceptional talent.
