Most of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes – but only sometimes – taking a decisive step that will change their destinies.
D.J. Taylor was born in 1960, went to Norwich School and St John’s College Oxford. He is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackeray and Orwell: The Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. His novels include Trespass and Derby Day, both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Kept: A Victorian Mystery and The Windsor Faction. David is also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945. His journalism appears in the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, The Tablet, The Spectator, The New Stateseman and, anonymously, in Private Eye . He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore. They have three sons and live in Norwich.
Read: An interview with DJ Taylor, Cherwell