Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and completed a Ph.D. on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones at Warwick University. He taught English Poetry at Warwick, subsequently working as a professional musician, writing music for jazz and cabaret. He also worked as a legal proofreader before becoming a freelance writer and journalist.

He is the author of five novels including The Dwarves of Death (1990), a cult murder story filmed as Five Seconds to Spare in 1999; the acclaimed What a Carve Up! (1994), a caustic satire of British life in the 1980s and winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; and The House of Sleep (1997), which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award and the Prix Médicis Etranger and recounts the adventures of a group of former university students, reunited at the mysterious cliff-top house where they used to live.

His most recent novel, The Rotters' Club (2001), is set in Birmingham during the 1970s and tells the story of a group of school friends working on the school magazine. A sequel, The Closed Circle, will be published in 2004.

Jonathan Coe is also the author of two biographies of film actors, Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart. His biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson is scheduled to come out in June 2004. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

To learn more about Jonathan Coe, go to Contemporary Writers.