Martin Booth | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 7 September 1944 Ribchester, Lancashire, England |
| Died | 12 February 2004 (aged 59) Stoodleigh, Devon, England |
| Education | Middlesex University |
| Writing career | |
| Years active | 1967–2004 |
Martin Booth (7 September 1944 – 12 February 2004) was an English novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.
Martin Booth was born in Ribchester, Lancashire, England, as the son of Joyce and Ken Booth, the latter of which was a Royal Navy civil servant. The family moved to Hong Kong in May 1952, where his father was stationed for a three-year tour as a grocery supplier to the British Navy. In his memoir Gweilo: A memoir of a Hong Kong Childhood, Booth recalls that the streets of Hong Kong were safe, and that he explored the city alone as a child. He and his mother also learned Cantonese. He attended Kowloon Junior School, the Peak School, then King George V School, and left in 1964.
From 1965 to 1968 he attended Trent Park College of Education in Cockfosters, North London, part of what is now Middlesex University. His main subject was science, and he obtained the Certificate of Education.
In England, Booth worked as a truck driver, legal clerk, wine steward, and English teacher (in Rushden). He also taught English at The Castle School, Taunton.
In 1974 Booth was poetry editor of Fuller d'Arch Smith, set up by Timothy d'Arch Smith and Jean Overton Fuller. He had bought a house in Knotting, Bedfordshire, and was instrumental in finding Fuller a house in Wymington which also became the registered office of the company.
Booth first made his name as a poet and as a publisher by producing volumes by British and American poets, including Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), featuring the character Cnot who founded the hamlet Knotting.
In the late 1970s Booth started to write fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.
Booth was a keen traveller who enjoyed flying, expressed in his poems, such as "Kent Says" and In Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers.
Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990).
Booth's novel Industry of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.
If truth be told, I never really left Hong Kong
Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children. The term gweilo means "ghost man" in Cantonese, but has been applied as a racial epithet for Caucasians (as in white ghosts). In the United States, the book was published as Golden Boy.
The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman.
Three Booth's novels have been translated into French : Gweilo, Music on the Bamboo Radio and The American.
