Julian Gough

Julian was born in London, raised in Tipperary, and educated in Galway. In answer to your most frequently asked question: Gough rhymes with cough. He lives in Berlin, drinks coffee, writes books, steals pigs, and sleeps late. Lately he likes to poke at new artforms, but we'll stick to the books here. His most charming novel is Juno & Juliet. His funniest, and oddest (and most prize-winning) novel is Jude: Level 1. It concerns a young Irish orphan with two penises, and his search for true love.

The radio play "The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009, introduced a couple of million new and slightly bemused listeners to the world of Jude. It is taken from the second volume of Jude's adventures - Jude in London - which will be published in September 2010.

Jude: Level 1 was shortlisted for the 2008 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, alongside excellent books by Alan Bennett, Will Self, John Walsh, Garrison Keillor and Joe Dunthorne. (Julian highly recommends Alan Bennett's superb The Uncommon Reader.) Will Self won the prestigious prize. However, certain scandalous events subsequently forced Julian to steal Will Self's pig. Let us draw a veil over the entire unsavory incident. (If you really must know more, you wretch, Google any combination of the words "Julian Gough", "Will Self", and "pig".)

In April 2007, Julian won the biggest prize in the world for a single short story, the BBC National Short Story Award, for "The Orphan and the Mob". (Opening line: "If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the mob would never have burnt down the orphanage.") The story is also the prologue to the genre-mangling Jude: Level 1...

He also, in his youth, wrote the words (and sang) on four albums by the cult Galway group, Toasted Heretic, and had a top-ten hit in Ireland with "Galway and Los Angeles", a song about not kissing Sinead O'Connor.