Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976.

He moved with his family to England and spent his childhood in Norwich and Thetford, Norfolk, later studying at Bradford University for a degree in Media Technology and Production. He started writing seriously during his final year at University, contributing a series entitled 'Cinema 100' to the anthology Five Uneasy Pieces (Pulp Faction). He has had short fiction published by several magazines, including Granta magazine. He has been runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Competition twice, in 2010 and 2011.

He left Bradford for Sheffield, then Nottingham, taking a series of shift-jobs to support his writing, and wrote his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), in Nottingham, while living on a narrowboat. His novel has received much press attention, as he was the youngest contender and only first novelist on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. The novel is set on an unnamed inner-city street on 'the last day of summer', and tells two parallel stories: one of the residents on the street on that day, ending in tragedy; one set a year later, telling of a former resident's attempts to unravel the facts of the tragedy. The Sunday Times named it a ' … triumphant prose-poem of ordinariness …', celebrating ' … the miraculousness of the everyday.' It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and to be shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best First Book) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways To Begin, was published in 2006 and his third, Even The Dogs, in 2010.

His first collection of short stories is This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012), set in the Lincolnshire fens.

In 2010, Jon McGregor received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham, and was made an honorary lecturer in their School of English Studies.