Matthew Kneale (GBR)

Matthew Kneale (born 24 November 1960) is a British writer, best known for his 2000 novel English Passengers.

Kneale's first novel, Whore Banquets tells the story of an Englishman whose affair with a Tokyo woman brings him into the realm of Japanese organized crime. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and was later republished as Mr Foreigner.

Inside Rose's Kingdom follows a young innocent who moves from the countryside to London, where he becomes caught up with a group of controlling, emotionally grasping people.

Sweet Thames is set in London in 1849 and tells the story of the trials of an enlightened drainage engineer whose wife vanishes during a cholera epidemic. It won the 1993 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

English Passengers tells the story of a religious-scientific expedition that seeks to find the Garden of Eden in Tasmania, a land whose aboriginal culture had been experiencing brutal destruction at the hands of British settlers and convicts. The novel is told by more than 20 voices. It won the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Australian Miles Franklin Award. In translation the book won France's Relay Prix d'Evasion. Interviewed in 2001, Kneale said that J. G. Farrell was a writer whom he particularly admired, as one who "wrote about the British Empire - and scathingly - back in the 1970s, when few in Britain wanted to think about the uglier parts of their country's past."

Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance is a volume of 12 short stories set around the world, from Colombia to London to Africa. They examine the lives of people as they struggled to survive and do the right thing, sometimes managing neither. One of the stories, "Powder", about a failed lawyer whose life changes when he chances upon a stash of cocaine and a mobile phone, was made into the French feature film, Une Pure Affaire.

When We Were Romans is told from the point of view of a boy, Laurence, whose mother suddenly and unexpectedly decides that she and her children, and even Laurence’s hamster, must flee England to Rome, where she lived many years before.

An Atheist's History of Belief is Kneale's first nonfiction book. It looks at the beliefs that people have devised to explain their world, from earliest prehistoric times to the present, as understood by a fascinated non-believer.

Works: 
Fiction

Whore Banquets, 1987
Inside Rose's Kingdom, 1989
Sweet Thames, 1992
English Passengers, 2000
Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, 2005
Powder, 2006
When We Were Romans, 2007

Non-fiction: 

An Atheist's History of Belief, 2013

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Kneale