John Spurling (Spurling variant)

Variant spelling: this person bears the related surname Spurling, not Spurlin.

John Antony Spurling (born 17 July 1936) is a Kenyan-born English playwright, novelist and critic. Wikipedia credits him with thirty-five plays and seven books.^[1] His own website says 29 of his plays have been performed on stage, radio or television.^[2]

Family and early life

Spurling was born in Kisumu, Kenya, to Antony Cuthbert Spurling (1906–1984) and Elizabeth Frances, née Stobart (1908–1990).^[3] His father was a colonial lawyer: Wikipedia, citing Who Was Who, says he was a resident magistrate and Crown Counsel in Kenya, later Solicitor-General of Trinidad and Attorney-General of the Gambia and of Sierra Leone, and a QC.^[1] Wikipedia describes his mother as a daughter of the teacher and historian J. C. Stobart.^[1]

He attended Nairobi Primary School before moving to England at about the age of ten.^[3][4] He was then educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford, where he took a BA in law in 1960.^[3] He did National Service as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957 and was a plebiscite officer in the Southern Cameroons in 1960–61.^[3]

Career

Spurling was a BBC Radio announcer from 1963 to 1966 and has been a freelance writer since 1966.^[3][4] He reviewed books and radio for The Spectator from 1966 to 1970 and was the art critic of the New Statesman from 1976 to 1988.^[1][4] He held the Henfield Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 1973.^[3]

His play MacRune's Guevara, about Che Guevara, was staged by the National Theatre in 1969 and later performed in many countries. His website notes an off-Broadway revival in 2006.^[1][2] His novels include The Ragged End (1989), After Zenda (1995), A Book of Liszts (2011) and The Ten Thousand Things (2014). Later books include Arcadian Nights (2015), a retelling of Greek myths, and A Mirror for Monkeys, both published by Duckworth.^[1][3]

The Ten Thousand Things

The Ten Thousand Things is a historical novel about the 14th-century Chinese painter Wang Meng. Wikipedia reports that Spurling worked on it for more than fifteen years and that 44 publishers rejected it before Duckworth Overlook published it in 2014.^[5] In June 2015 it won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which was presented at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose. The judges called it a "mesmerising, elegantly drawn picture of old imperial China". The shortlist of seven included Martin Amis, Adam Foulds and Helen Dunmore.^[4] BBC News then described him as the author of 30 plays and four novels.^[4]

Honours and personal life

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.^[1] He married the biographer Hilary Spurling in 1961. They have three children and live in London.^[1][3]