Warwick Collins

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Warwick Collins (born December 14, 1948) is a British novelist, screenwriter, and yacht designer.

Collins was born in Johannesburg to English-speaking parents. His father, Robin Collins, was a novelist who wrote under the nom-de-plume Robin Cranford. Robin Collins' novels were written from a liberal perspective and one of them, My City Fears Tomorrow, was banned by the South African apartheid regime. When Warwick Collins was eleven, the whole family moved to England, and Collins entered The King's School, Canterbury. He continued his education at the University of Sussex, where he read Biology.

An incident with John Maynard Smith in 1976—Maynard Smith prevented the fledgling biologist from attending an academic conference and giving a paper in which he questioned an aspect of Darwinist theory—made Collins give up his scientific career and pursue his literary interests instead. His poetry had already appeared in Encounter between 1968 and 1971.

Collins became a yacht designer and invented and patented the tandem keel, which was conceived to create high performance at low draft, but remains one of the radical keels in the America's Cup. Subsequently Collins turned to fiction, publishing three sailing novels and then a series of more wide-ranging novels, including two (The Rationalist and The Marriage of Souls) which are set in 18th century Lymington.

Collins's political views are liberal, but (in 1979) he was asked by Keith Joseph to join a Conservative party think tank chaired by John Hoskyns (who became Chief Political Adviser to Margaret Thatcher and was later knighted) to work on issues such as privatization. Collins, though left of centre politically, has always believed, in common with "classical liberals" such as Gladstone, that the free market is a superior means of distributing wealth than the state.

Collins' political views manifested themselves in his novel Gents (1996) which has recently been republished by The Friday Project, and was reviewed as an all-time classic in the Times (8 September 2007). Gents, which describes the lives of three West Indian immigrants who run a urinal in London, is considered to be a leading fiction on tolerance. Collins claims it was stimulated in part by his memories of apartheid when he lived as a child in South Africa.

Collins's other fictions include the somewhat luridly entitled Fuckwoman, a spoof on the superhero genre which details the adventures of a feminist vigilante who hunts down men who commit crimes against women. Set in Los Angeles, it also satirises the movie industry, contrasting Hollywood's emphasis on the image over reality. It has been published in French, German and Italian translations but not yet in English.

Warwick Collins maintains a blog at "www.publicpoems.com".

[edit] Novels

For 2008, The Friday Project are planning to publish twelve short novels by Warwick Collins, one per month.

[edit] References

[edit] External links