British Authors Online

Biography

Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972 in North Devon, England, and grew up in the Devon countryside, close to the sea. This pastoral landscape still exerts an influence on his fiction.

After failing his A-levels, Crisp spent five years working with Wolf and Water Theatre Company as an actor and stage manager. During this period of his life he concentrated most of his energies on the band, The Dead Bell, for whom he played bass guitar and wrote lyrics. The band split up, however, before achieving any public success, and, devastated by this blow, Crisp entered into a wilderness period, some of which is described in his novella 'The Haunted Bicycle.'

Finally, seeing no other way forward, he decided to try and study Japanese at university. He entered Durham University in 1996, where his determination to write was rekindled. Much of the work in his first and second collections was written during the four years he was a student here.

As part of his degree course he spent a year in Japan, and his ambivalent fascination for the culture and quite unequivocal love of Japanese literature has informed his own writing.

In the year 2000 he graduated with a first and took a job teaching English in Taiwan, where he continued learning the Mandarin he had started at university and spent his free time drinking green tea on the mist-shrouded slopes of the mountains to the south of the capital.

During this sojourn he was awarded a scholarship to research Japanese literature at Kyoto University. He studied there for eighteen months, specialising in the works of Higuchi Ichiyou. There, too, he spent much of his free time in the tea shops of Uji, south of Kyoto. Finally, due to crippling depression, he was forced to turn down an extension to his research scholarship and return to his native shores.

He currently resides in Twickenham, on the outskirts of London, where he shares his life with his gardenia, Esmerelda, and his collection of Japanese ceramics.

His first collection of short stories, The Nightmare Exhibition, was published in the UK in 2001 by BJM Press. Two new collections are scheduled in the UK for 2004.

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