Simon Corrigan

Simon Corrigan is the British author of Tommy Was Here, which won the Betty Trask Award in 1993, and Sweets With Strangers.

Life and career Born in Barnsley in 1964, Corrigan studied at Chetham's School of Music and went on to read English at King's College, Cambridge.

Described as "promising", Tommy Was Here received extensive coverage in the literary press. Publishers Weekly said: "Corrigan's elegant prose is flecked with irony, wit and astute social observation," although Kirkus Reviews described the novel as "melodramatic," saying: "Corrigan has yet to find his sea legs as a novelist, but he does have one great asset: the ability to keep a story moving."

Corrigan's second novel, Sweets From Strangers, was published in 1994 with considerably less press coverage, although it was described by Kirkus as: "an eerie and strangely satisfying read."

Corrigan lived in London, Paris, Lisbon and Trieste before settling in Budapest, where he wrote about the challenges of learning the language, and his growing appreciation for Hungarian literature in translation. In 2004, he said in an article that he was researching and working on two more books, "dealing respectively with vampirism and Empress Elisabeth of Austria." Simon Corrigan died in 2006, in Budapest.

Books