Clive Sinclair (1948-2018)

Clive Sinclair was the author of 14 books, including the novels Bibliosexuality, Blood Libels, Cosmetic Effects and Augustus Rex. He was equally comfortable — perhaps more so — with the shorter form: the most notable examples being Hearts of Gold (winner of the Somerset Maugham award), The Lady with the Laptop (winner of both the Jewish Quarterly and the Pen silver pen awards for fiction), Bedbugs (shortlisted for the inaugural Dylan Thomas award), Meet the Wife and Death & Texas. Among his other works were A Soap Opera from Hell: essays on the facts of life and the facts of death and Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West. His occasional pieces included columns for the Independent, book and film reviews (usually for the TLS), and exotica for Condé Nast Traveller. In 1981 he was awarded a bicentennial arts fellowship by the British Council, and in 1983 was chosen as one of the 20 best of young British novelists.

Between 1983 and 1987 he was literary editor of the Jewish Chronicle. In 1988 he was the British Council guest-writer-in-residence at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and in 1996 the British Library Penguin writer’s fellow. Clive also served as a visiting lecturer at the universities of East Anglia and of California at Santa Cruz, his special subjects being gothic fiction, creative writing, detective fiction and Holocaust literature. Clive Sinclair had a doctorate from the University of East Anglia and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.