Graham Caveney

Graham Caveney began his writing career at the New Musical Express in the 1980s before going to write for a variety of papers and magazines including The Face, City Limits, Q, Guardian, The Independent, The Independent On Sunday, Arena and GQ.

His books include Shopping In Space: Essays on Blank American Fiction (Serpent’s Tail, 1992; with Elizabeth Young); biographies of William Burroughs – The Priest, They Called Him (Bloomsbury, 1997) and Allen Ginsberg – Screaming with Joy (Bloomsbury, 1999).

The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness (Picador, 2017),  a memoir about growing up in the North of England during the 1970s and his experiences of Catholic sexual abuse, was shortlisted for the Portico Prize.

On Agoraphobia, was published by Picador in 2022 and is a fascinating, entertaining and sometimes painfully acute look at what it means to go through life with an anxiety disorder that evades easy definition.

His latest book, The Body in the Library (Peninsula Press) will be published this month, charting a year of disease from diagnosis to past ‘original sell-by-date’. Shot through with Northerness, tenderness, and Caveney’s trademark humour, The Body in the Library reflects on an unfinished lifetime filled with books and with love.

Photo courtesy of Rebecca Kidd