Biography

Marcel Theroux is the award-winning author of six novels.

He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He grew up in England, studied English Literature at Cambridge University and International Relations at Yale, where he specialized in  Soviet and East European Studies.

His second novel, The Paperchase (published in the U.S. as The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes), won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2002. His fourth novel, Far North (2009) was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2011.

Far North has been widely translated.  A Japanese edition prepared by the celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami was published in April 2012.

Theroux’s fifth novel,  Strange Bodies, was published in 2013.  It was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Science Fiction in 2014.

His sixth novel, The Secret Books, based on the alleged discovery of a lost Christian gospel in a Himalayan monastery, was published to critical acclaim in 2017.

In addition to his books, Theroux has written a number of original screenplays and written and presented more than a dozen documentaries on subjects ranging from climate change to the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi. He is a regular presenter of Unreported World on Channel 4.