Conville & Walsh

The 25th Hay Festival ended this weekend to the roof-raising cheers of Bill Bailey’s audience. It’s been a boggling, celebratory, enlightening 12 days. Rain came, shine came; a quarter of a million readers and writers shared stories and ideas. Alongside the greats of the literary world Hay audiences lauded emerging writers, and we were delighted to see that Nick Harkaway won this year’s Hay Festival Emerging Writer award.

Nick has two books out this year. In February his second, novel, Angelmaker, was published to wide acclaim, with Patrick Ness writing in the Guardian that it was ‘one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages… It’s brilliantly entertaining… Pure, unhinged delight.’ He has also written a non-fiction book, published in May, called The Blind Giant, about how we can be human in a digital world.

Nick was born in Cornwall in 1972. He studied philosophy, sociology, and politics at Clare College, Cambridge, and then worked in the film industry. He has trained in fencing, aikido, jujitsu and kickboxing, and is notably bad at all of them. Over the past ten years, his professional writing has included several film scripts, a brochure for a company making modular bottle-capping machinery, and website copy for an exclusive boutique selling glamorous designer lingerie. He lives in London with his wife, Clare, and his daughter, Clemency.

You can follow @harkaway on twitter, and find his books in any good bookshop.