Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath (born 7 February 1950) is a British novelist, whose work has been categorised as gothic fiction.

Early life McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital from the age of five where his father was Medical Superintendent. He was educated at a Jesuit boarding school in Windsor from the age of thirteen, before moving to another Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, upon the closure at the age of sixteen, he ran away from this institution to London.

McGrath also worked as a teacher of creative writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall semester of 2006.

Career His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships.

His novel Martha Peake won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy and Asylum was shortlisted for The Guardian Fiction Prize in 1996.

McGrath was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. On 27 June 2018, the University of Stirling, Scotland, conferred on him the degree of Doctor of the University "for Patrick McGrath's outstanding support of academic research."

Personal life He is married to actress Maria Aitken and divides his time between London and New York City. He is the oldest of four siblings. to the current unnamed novel-in-progress on the Spanish Civil War, McGrath shows increased interest in the fascistic tendencies in international politics and its effects on the psychology of characters. In the former, for example, the main character Joan Grice uncovers the man she had been living with for a long time, who recently died, had been in the past a member of Mosley's British Union of Fascists. This revelation is so upsetting that causes her to get crazy, and her mental breakdown is signed by a murderous act. Similarly, in McGrath's Last Days in Cleaver Square (2021), the narrator, an old man called Francis McNulty—a Spanish civil war veteran—is haunted by Francisco Franco's ghost, which appears in his London garden, and later in his bed, too. He is so much obsessed with his hallucinations that at a certain point, while in Madrid, Franco's spirit causes him to commit a bizarre act of atonement.

Other works

Blood and Water and Other Tales (1989) (short-story collection) Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005) (linked short stories) Writing Madness (entire collected short stories from 1989 to 2014, along with four decades of selected criticism; edited by and with afterword from Danel Olson, prefaced by Joyce Carol Oates with seven original engravings from Harry Brockway. A 2017 Bram Stoker Award finalist; a 2018 World Fantasy Award winner ("Special Award – Professional").

McGrath has also co-edited and written the introduction to a highly influential anthology of short fiction, The New Gothic.

He has published many reviews and essays, including introductions to Barnaby Rudge, Moby Dick, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and In a Glass Darkly.