Martin Booth

Martin Booth (1944-2004) was a British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and founded the Sceptre Press. He was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, which he left for Britain in 1964. He first made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing slim volumes by British and American poets. His own books of verse include the two Knotting books collected here, as well as Killing the Moscs and Meeting the Snowy North Again. In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985, and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War. His lifelong interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about his childhood hero Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers, and also a subsequent study of the endangered rhino. Later non-fiction books included a remarkable guide to Hong Kong, The Dragon and the Pearl, as well as biographies of Aleister Crowley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While his successful early novels tended to reflect his own past in an Africa and Asia touched by the British Empire, his later books reflected his interest in European locations, such as Italy, which features in the novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990, later filmed as The American, starring George Clooney in 2010). His penultimate novel, Industry of Souls, was set in Russia and was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. He died of cancer in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo (released as Golden Boy in the USA), a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.