Jonathan Buckley (writer)
Jonathan Buckley (born 1956) is a British novelist and short-story writer. He has written thirteen novels and several travel guides. His fiction often uses unusual forms, such as letters, multiple narrators, or fragmented narration.
Buckley was born in Birmingham and grew up in Dudley. He studied English at the University of Sussex and did research at King's College London. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was an editorial director at Rough Guides, writing guides to Italy and contributing to The Rough Guide to Classical Music and The Rough Guide to Opera. He lives in Brighton.
His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang (1997), is written as correspondence between a biographer and the brother of a pianist. Xerxes (1999) interweaves a scholar in 1820s Germany with the Persian king Xerxes. Other early novels include Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), and So He Takes the Dog (2006).
From 2010 on, Buckley published several novels with Sort Of Books, including Contact (2010), Telescope (2011), Nostalgia (2013), and The River is the River (2015). He won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2015 for "Briar Road."
His later works include The Great Concert of the Night (2018) and Live; live; live (2020). In 2022 he shared the Novel Prize for Tell, a book-length work published in 2023. Tell was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2024. His 2025 novel One Boat, published by Fitzcarraldo, follows a woman returning to a Greek town after her father’s death and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. Buckley is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and has been a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund since 2003.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:19 (CET).