John Whitbourn

A former archaeologist but now professedly 'going straight', John Whitbourn has had nineteen books published since winning the BBC & Victor Gollancz 'First Fantasy Novel' prize (judged by Terry Pratchett, among others) with 'A Dangerous Energy' in 1991.

They include the multi-volume 'Binscombe Tales' series; ‘Frankenstein’s Legions’, a Gothic steam-punk style extrapolation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale; and BABYLONdon, set during the 1780 'Gordon Riots'. Plus, more recently, 'Nothing is True...' and ‘Everything is Permissible’, two volumes of fantasy-tinged and unreliable alleged autobiography by infamous playboy-monarch King Farouk I of Egypt (1920-1965). Like much of Whitbourn's work, the collective 'Book of Farouk' is described as 'disgracefully amusing and amusingly disgraceful...'

In 2020 he published ‘The Age of the Triffids', a sequel to John Wyndham’s 'The Day of the Triffids’. For copyright reasons that book is not for sale outside Canada and New Zealand. Also in 2020, Whitbourn's collected short fiction, 1990-date, was published as 'Altered Englands'.

His work has received favourable reviews in The Times, Telegraph, and Guardian newspapers and elsewhere. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy says he 'writes well with dry wit'.

A rare press interview with Whitbourn in 2000 was revealingly entitled ‘Confessions of a Counter-Reformation Green Anarcho-Jacobite'.