Stephen Clarke (born 1958) is a British journalist and novelist.
Before publishing his novels, Clarke wrote comedy sketches for BBC Radio 4 and jokes for a stand-up comedian. He also wrote comic book stories for U.S. cartoonist and comics artist Gilbert Shelton. Working for a French press group, Stephen Clarke has been living in Paris, France for more than a decade.
On April 1, 2004 Clarke self-published, under three different names, three "seriously funny" novels he had written, in editions of 200 copies each, intending to sell them through his web site or giving them away to friends. The titles, all published by "Red Garage Books", were:
- Beam Me Up, or A Brief History of the Future (a novel about teleportation) by Stephen Clarke (ISBN 2952163804);
- Who Killed Beano? A Genetically Modified Murder Mystery by Chris Kent (a—fictitious—female author who, it was alleged, tragically drowned in a diving accident shortly after the completion of the book) (ISBN 2952163820); and
- A Year in the Merde (its title an allusion to Peter Mayle 's A Year in Provence ) by Paul West (who is in fact the first person narrator of the novel).
However, A Year in the Merde became a word of mouth must have book in Paris, especially after it had been reviewed in a French newspaper. Eventually, Clarke decided to sell the rights to "real publishers" (Transworld in the UK, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC in the United States, Penguin in Canada, Random House in Australia). In France, the novel, published by Nil Editions , is called God Save La France.
A sequel to A Year in the Merde, entitled Merde Actually (cf. Love Actually), will be published in 2005.
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Last updated: 05-06-2005 18:57:51
