Search Results for: John Gardner

After COLONEL SUN (1968) by Kingsley Amis, John Gardner was the next writer to be asked to write further adventures of James Bond. He wrote, like Fleming, fourteen Bond books, plus novelisations of the films GOLDENEYE and LICENCE TO KILL, from 1981 to 1996. Before becoming an author of fiction in the early 1960s John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer, a journalist and, for a short time, a priest in the Church of England. ‘Probably the biggest mistake I ever made,’ he says. ‘I confused the desire to please my father with a vocation which I soon found I did not have.’ In all, Gardner had fifty-five novels to his credit – many of them bestsellers. John Gardner died in 2007.

John Gardner (1933-1982) John Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His critically acclaimed books include the novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as several works of nonfiction and criticism such as On Becoming a Novelist. He was also a professor of medieval literature and a pioneering creative writing teacher whose students included Raymond Carver and Charles Johnson.