Justin Cartwright

Justin James Cartwright  (20 May 1943 – 3 December 2018) was a British novelist, originally from South Africa.

Biography

Cartwright was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but grew up in Johannesburg where his father was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail newspaper. He was educated in South Africa, the United States and at Trinity College, Oxford. Cartwright worked in advertising and directed documentaries, films and television commercials. He managed election broadcasts, first for the Liberal Party and then the SDP-Liberal Alliance during the 1979, 1983 and 1987 British general elections. For his work on election broadcasts, Cartwright was appointed an MBE.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation presenter Ramona Koval described Cartwright's novels as being "based in contemporary settings but he’s able to suffuse them with the big questions that haunt us". Three of Cartwright's early novels feature a character named Timothy Curtiz, named partly for Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and partly for Cartwright's own brother. In Interior, Curtiz is in Africa investigating the disappearance of his father in 1959 while on a trip for National Geographic. In Look at It This Way, Curtiz is a columnist for Manhattan magazine while he is living in London, has a daughter named Gemma, and by the end of the novel has a partner named Victoria. In Masai Dreaming, Curtiz is in Africa researching a film about Claudia Cohn-Casson, and his relationship with Victoria is having "complications." Look at It This Way was made into a three-part, 180-minutes drama by the BBC in 1992, starring Kristin Scott Thomas; Cartwright wrote the screenplay.

In Every Face I Meet was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award in 1995, and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize; Leading the Cheers won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1998; White Lightning was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award in 2002. Masai Dreaming won the South African M-Net Literary Awards.

The Promise of Happiness was chosen as one of Richard and Judy's Book Club's titles for 2005 and was the winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize of South Africa.

Cartwright lived in London with his wife, Penny, and two sons.

Bibliography

Novels

 Deep Six (1972)
 Fighting Men (1977)
 Horse of Darius (1980) 
 Freedom for the Wolves (1983)
 Interior (1988) 
 Look at it This Way (1990) 
 Masai Dreaming (1993) 
 In Every Face I Meet (1995) 
 Leading the Cheers (1998) 
 Half in Love (2001) 
 White Lightning (2002) 
 The Promise of Happiness (2005) 
 The Song Before it is Sung (2007)
 To Heaven by Water Bloomsbury (2009)
 Other People's Money Bloomsbury (2011) 
 Lion Heart (2013) 
 Up Against the Night (2015, Bloomsbury)

Non-fiction

 Not Yet Home (1997) 
 This Secret Garden (2008) 
 Oxford Revisited (2008)

Films

 Rosie Dixon – Night Nurse (1978) sex comedy 
 Look at It This Way (1992) TV mini-series (novel and adaptation) 
 Q.E.D. (producer) (1 episode, 1983)

External links

 Justin Cartwright: Bloomsbury publishers page.
 Audio slideshow interview with Justin Cartwright talking about To Heaven by Water on The Interview Online

References

1943 births
South African male novelists
South African Members of the Order of the British Empire
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
2018 deaths
20th-century British novelists
21st-century British novelists
Writers from Cape Town
Writers from Johannesburg
20th-century British male writers
21st-century British male writers