Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist from London, England. Since the publication of his first novel, Remainder, in 2007—praised by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books as “one of the great English novels of the last ten years”—McCarthy’s writing has boldly expanded our conception of what fiction should look like and what it can do. In Remainder, an unnamed narrator suffers a brain injury and uses the settlement money to stage elaborate reenactments of his memories and dreams. The novel won the 2008 Believer Book Award and, in Smith’s words, “[offered] a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.” His two subsequent novels, Men in Space and C, further rupture and revise conventional understandings of the individual self in relation to his world; C was a finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. McCarthy is also a founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious network of writers, philosophers, and artists intervening “against idealism in philosophy and idealist or transcendent conceptions of art.” His novel Satin Island (2015) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.