Terence Blacker

Terence Blacker is a novelist, biographer and musician.

The son of a professional soldier, he was educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Having worked in horse-racing, as a bookseller in Paris and as a publisher, he became a professional writer during the 1980s.

His first novel Fixx was published by Bloomsbury in 1989 – “Possibly Blacker has written one of the great rogues of literature,” wrote one critic – and was followed by The Fame Hotel (Bloomsbury, 1992) and Reverence (Bloomsbury, 1996). Of Kill Your Darlings, published in 2000 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and St Martin’s Press in America, the Washington Post wrote, “It is Blacker’s achievement that, even as he makes the madness of the writing game wildly funny, he also conveys the underlying tragedy of a marriage ruined, a son lost, a life wasted.”

Terence Blacker’s biography of his friend, the writer Willie Donaldson, was published by Ebury Press in 2006. Entitled You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson, it was read on BBC Radio 4 as ‘Book of the Week’ and described by India Knight in the Sunday Times as “utterly gripping…. hilarious… heartbreaking.”

A regular broadcaster on Radio 4 and Radio 3, Terence Blacker has also written award-winning children’s books which have been published in 18 languages, including The Transfer (Macmillan, 1998) which has been optioned for TV He was a weekly op-ed columnist for the Independent from 1998 to 2016.

As a songwriter, he has released five albums of his songs, including 'Playing for Time' (2020), which was included in the Sunday Times’s Top 100 Albums of of the Year.

The Twyning, a story of love, war and rats was published in 2013 by Head of Zeus. Yours, E.R. reveals the wry, funny and enchanting fictional weekly letters of Her Majesty the Queen to Sir Jeremy Scrimgeour, one of her private secretaries. It was published in 2013 by Headline.

Terence lives in south Norfolk.