Author of the week: Nick Hornby

last updated 8 January 2015

The “founder of Lad Lit” is quietly outgrowing the readers who gave him his start, said Aidan Smith in the Edinburgh Scotsman. More than a decade after his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy proved that comic stories about emotionally arrested young men could attract a sizable chunk of that very demographic, Nick Hornby is choosing female characters as his protagonists and finding the results rewarding. “I have the same interests as women,” says the 52-year-old Londoner. “Well, apart from the football and music, obviously.” He says that when he was young he read mostly novels by women and wanted, when he started writing, to set his own books “in the home.” His readership turned mostly female some years ago.

Hornby’s signature interests make cameos both in his new novel, Juliet, Naked, and in An Education, a forthcoming movie for which he wrote the screenplay, said Christy Grosz in the Los Angeles Times. The husband of the novel’s heroine is a pop-music obsessive, and Hornby compares the film’s 16-year-old “Jenny” to every suburban kid who ever joined a rock band to get in on the cool things happening in the city. But Hornby feels that he’s lucky to be able to branch out—into new worldviews, into screenwriting, and even into writing lyrics for the songwriter Ben Folds. “I have decided to work in as many different fields as I can,” he says. “I occasionally wish I could write something that doesn’t sound like me.”