Richard Beard

Richard Beard is the author of five novels, most recently Lazarus is Dead, described by the Scotland Sunday Herald as 'surprising, spellbinding, witty and utterly original.'

X20, his first novel, is about a man giving up smoking: every time he wants a cigarette, he writes something down instead. Damascus is a love-story set on a single day, 1 November 1993, and all the nouns in the novel come from that day's edition of The Times newspaper. The Cartoonist is a story set in and around Disneyland Paris, in which libel and copyright restrictions prevent the characters from ever entering the Disneyland theme-park.

Dry Bones, published by Secker and Warburg, is a 'rollercoaster philosophical journey of Stoppard-like brilliance.' (Glasgow Herald).

Beard is also the author of three works of non-fiction, Muddied Oafs, The Soul of Rugby (Yellow Jersey 2003), Manly Pursuits, Beating the Australians (Yellow Jersey 2006), and Becoming Drusilla (Harvill Secker 2008).

Richard Beard was a games teacher at the Dragon School in Oxford before becoming private secretary to Mathilda, Duchess of Argyll. He moved to Paris to work at the National Library while continuing his studies with the Open University. In 1994, he enrolled on Malcolm Bradbury's Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, followed by two years in Geneva, then a house in the Mendip Hills owned by the Royal Society of Literature, and on to Japan in 2003 as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo.

In 2006 he returned to Europe and lived in Strasbourg, and is now back in the UK as Director of the National Academy of Writing.