Stephen Clarke (writer)

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Stephen Clarke is a British journalist and novelist. He lives in Paris, where he "divides his time between writing and not writing."

Before publishing his "Merde" novels, Clarke wrote comedy sketches for BBC Radio 4 and jokes for a stand-up comedian. He also wrote comic-book stories for the U.S. cartoonist and comics artist Gilbert Shelton. He spent several years working in Glasgow as a bilingual lexicographer for the dictionary firm HarperCollins. He then moved to Paris, France to work for a French press group, and has now lived there for more than a decade.

On April 1, 2004 Clarke self-published three novels, under three different names, in editions of 200 copies each, intending to sell them through his original "Red Garage Books" website [1] or give them away to friends. He describes these books as "seriously funny", "comedies with a message". The titles, all issued under the imprint "Red Garage Books", were:

A Year in the Merde (its title an allusion to Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence) by Paul West (who is in fact the first person narrator of the novel).
Beam Me Up, or A Brief History of the Future (a novel about teleportation) by Stephen Clarke (ISBN 2-9521638-0-4);
Who Killed Beano? A Genetically Modified Murder Mystery by Chris Kent (a—fictitious—female author who, it was alleged, tragically drowned in a diving accident shortly after the completion of the book) (ISBN 2-9521638-2-0).

However, A Year in the Merde became a word-of-mouth must-have book in Paris, especially after it had been reviewed in a French newspaper. Eventually, Clarke decided to sell the rights to "real publishers" (Transworld in the UK, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC in the United States, Penguin in Canada, and Random House in Australia). In France, the novel is published by Nil Editions and entitled God Save La France.

A sequel to A Year in the Merde, entitled Merde Actually (a reference to the romantic comedy Love Actually), was published in 2005. It was released as In the Merde for Love in the United States. He has also now published Talk to the Snail in 2006, essentially a survivor's guide to the French language and the French themselves. At one point, it was the only title in Britain's top ten humour books that wasn't Simpsons-related.

The third novel in the Merde series was published in July 2007 in Great Britain, and will come out in the USA in May 2008 - it is called Merde Happens, and features the Englishman Paul West, who accepts a job that involves him driving across the USA in a Mini with, at various times, his French girlfriend and his American poet pal Jake. They start out in New York, meander chaotically down the East Coast to Miami and then head for California. It is due out in the USA in May 2008.

He is currently working on the follow-up Merde novel, due to be published in the summer of 2008.