John Noone

JOHN NOONE is a British and Irish writer, born in 1936. He was raised in Darlington, County Durham, in the north-east of England, the third of six children. His paternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant from County Mayo who settled in Cumberland towards the end of the 19th century, and his other grandparents were Cumbrian of Scots descent. He was educated locally at Roman Catholic primary and grammar schools, completed his National Service in the Durham Light Infantry and graduated from King's College, Newcastle, then part of Durham University. While in the army he served in the Suez Canal Zone and in 1961 returned to Egypt as lecturer at Alexandria University. Since then, apart from a couple of years in the late sixties, he has lived outside of the UK, lecturing in English literature and European culture until 1976, notably under the aegis of the British Council in the University of Benghazi, Libya, and in the University of Kyoto, Japan. It was in Kyoto that he met his present wife, a francophone Belgian from Brussels, and they have been resident in France since 1980, though their travels have taken them to all parts of the world. His wife has two daughters and he a son by previous marriages.

His first novel, THE MAN WITH THE CHOCOLATE EGG, was joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1967, and his second novel THE NIGHT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT, received an Arts Council Award in 1974. His short stories were published variously in the 1980s and 90s before being brought together in the collection, LIKE AS NOT. In 1988 he published THE MAN BEHIND THE IRON MASK, a work of historical detection hailed in France as "the Copernican revolution" of Iron Mask studies. The book was published in a revised edition in 1994 and again in a new edition in 2003. A Kindle edition was published in 2013 followed in 2014 by a Kindle edition in French, L'HOMME DERRIERE LE MASQUE DE FER. Also in 2013 appeared the Kindle edition of TURTLE TORTOISE, IMAGE AND SYMBOL, a monograph in two volumes, each of four books, written from the vantage of thirty-five years of research as curator of the privately owned Forani Collection of the Turtle/Tortoise in Art and Artifact. In his latest work, Noone has returned to fiction with three psychological thrillers, all published iny Kindle: O FORTUNA in 2016 and ANTEROS in 2017, bith set in the South of France, and CULLER OF BEASS in 2019, set in England and France..