Jonathon X. Coudrille

JONATHON XAVIER COUDRILLE was conceived on the Lizard peninsula in a whitewashed cottage called ‘Wy Worrie’. He spent his romantic early years on the road learning guitar, banjo, voice projection and knife-throwing and, attended the last Dame School in the Cotswolds where he fell in love with books while his glamorous mother coped with cooking over a stick fire and his Artist father carved a trajectory through Variety Theatre to become an early Television Star.

Banished (gratefully!) from his boy's school, Coudrille spent the 1960s in Saint Ives as a painter and folk singer until, recruited by the BBC, he left for London. His broadcasting career was truncated by the car-crash that catapulted him into print; immobile with spinal damage, he wrote and illustrated for his young son “A Beastly Collection” (Warne 1974) now much-collected and “Farmer Fisher” (Deutsch), chosen as 1976 Children’s Book of the Year. He has played at the Festival Hall, painted in North America, Southern Africa, Russia and the Far East and toured globally with Kazatka Cossacks, returning to The Lizard in 1990 for the birth of his daughter.

Past Honorary Artist member of The Arts Club, member of Chelsea Arts Club Melody Maker Top Soloist, South-West Academician and past trustee and, Poet (his anthology ‘Love Death and, Bad Behaviour' was published in 2014 by Footsteps Press) he divides his time between writing, painting, his eclectic jazz trio "Gwelhellin", his studio and, his labyrinthine garden on the Cornish cliffs. Wikipedia defines him as a Polymath.