Week in December (Faulks)

Author Bio 
• Birth—April 20, 1953
• Where—Donnington, in Berkshire, England, UK
• Education—Wellington College; Cambridge University
• Awards—Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature;
   Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• Currently—lives in London, England


Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire on April 20, 1953. He was the younger son of Peter Faulks (1917-1998) and Pamela, nee Lawless (1923-2003). Peter Faulks was a partner in the local law firm Pitman and Bazett. He had interrupted his legal training in 1939 to enlist with the Duke of Wellington’s, a Yorkshire-based infantry regiment. He fought in Holland, France, North Africa, Italy, Palestine and Syria. He was awarded the Military Cross in Tunisia. He was wounded in North Africa and again when his company was in slit trenches at Anzio. He received further wounds when the Germans bombed the beachhead hospital while he was waiting to be evacuated. He made a full recovery and lived an active life, later sitting as a judge in London and Reading.

Pamela Faulks was the only daughter of Philip Lawless, MC, a sports reporter for The Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph, specialising in rugby and golf, which he played off a handicap of plus two. In 1945, he was reporting on the American advance into Germany across the Rhine at Remagem and was killed by enemy fire.

Faulks’s mother introduced her sons to books at a young age. She also took them to the theatre and to galleries in London. "She had the full classical canon on vinyl and we absorbed all that, though we were much keener on pop music," said Faulks. " 'Pick of the Pops' with Alan Freeman on Sunday afternoons was sacred. Later on, Edward had a rock band at school. My father was into books only, I think, not music so much—he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene. My mother knew all of Dickens backwards. Those characters were real people to her.’

Both brothers were educated at Elstree School near Reading. "It was a demanding and old-fashioned school, and we both had to rise to the challenge," said Faulks. "I liked it very much; it was a formidable education." Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College in 1966 and in 1970 won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007.

In the year between school and university he had studied in Paris and learned to speak French. After university, he spent a year in Bristol, writing a novel. "From the age of about fourteen, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D.H.Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age." At the end of the year, he migrated to London where he found work teaching in a private school in Camden Town.

After two years, he got a job running a small book club called the New Fiction Society which had been set up by the Arts Council to stimulate sales of literary fiction. He took over from the novelist David Hughes, who became a lifelong friend. In 1979 Faulks joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph as the junior reporter on the diary column. "I was still writing books in the evening and at weekends," said Faulks, "but they weren’t much good." He had also been given work as freelance book reviewer, first at the Sunday Times, then at the Spectator and Books and Bookmen magazine.

He and Edward had been sharing a house, but went their different ways. "I bought a small flat in Notting Hill," said Faulks. "I had no television and I was meant to just write at night. Eventually, at about the fourth attempt I wrote something publishable. I rang up a publisher called James Michie. I didn’t really know how distinguished James was; he was just someone I’d met at a party. But I later found out he’d published Graham Greene and discovered Sylvia Plath. After some humming and hah-ing he accepted the book, which I called A Trick of the Light. I was twenty-nine. I got the news in a phone booth on Holborn Viaduct. It was a good moment; it felt like the beginning of something at last, after a long and occasionally dispiriting apprenticeship."

Faulks worked as a feature writer for the Sunday Telegraph from 1983 to 1986, when he went to join the Independent as Literary Editor. "In its early days the Independent was a great place to be. We had such a good football team, apart from anything else. We won the Fleet Street league in our first year by beating the Sun in the last match."

The Girl at the Lion d’Or came out in 1989 and, although described by one paper as "the most raved-about new novel for years," sales were modest and Faulks stayed with the Independent, becoming deputy editor of the Sunday paper when it launched in the same year. He left in 1991.

He subsequently wrote a monthly column for the Guardian, then for two years a weekly one in the Evening Standard and had a short spell as film reviewer for the Mail On Sunday. However, following the success of Birdsong, he has been able to focus his energies on books. "I haven’t had a proper job for years and would now be unemployable," he said in a 2005 interview.

In 1989, he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the Independent books pages, later an editor at the Independent magazine. They have three children. They spent a year in south west France, near Agen, in 1995-96, while Faulks was writing Charlotte Gray, but have lived in London since then.

Sebastian Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in Human Traces. (Adapted from the author's website.)