Lucky Jim nets £100,000 for first novel
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Your support makes all the difference.A £20,000-a-year university lecturer who buys his clothes from Oxfam is set to make at least £100,000 from his first novel.
James Hawes, a lecturer in German literature at University College Swansea, whose only other published work, an academic tome, Nietzsche and the End of Freedom (Frankfurt 1993), has only sold around 160 copies and netted just £184 (after tax) in royalties last year, is racking up international advances on his thriller, A White Merc With Fins.
Jonathan Cape paid £32,000 for the UK rights and the US rights have been acquired by the guru of US publishing, Sonny Mehta. The Dutch and the Spanish rights have already been snapped up and German, French and Italian publishers are vying for the work.
More surprisingly, given that the book will not be published until January, film and television firms are also beating a path to his door for the film rights
Not bad for a 34-year-old who specialises in Kafka and Nietzsche and who once buskedon the French horn in Zaragoza, northern Spain.
Dr Hawes has also worked as a professional actor. His Hotspur in Henry IV at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre won rave reviews in the Guardian.
He has been a playwright, an English teacher in Spain and an industrial archaelogist. He said he was "entirely astonished" by the interest in his book.
Dr Hawes follows in the footsteps of Sir Kingsley Amis, who was also a lecturer at Swansea and whose first novel, Lucky Jim, made his literary reputation.
Dr Hawes's story is about a group of disaffected young people who decide to rob a bank. It has been described as a cross between Reservoir Dogs and Generation X.
"There is a kind of state-of- the-millennium angle to it. You want to have the feeling that you are saying something that is on a lot of people's lips but have not quite said yet," he said.
When he submitted the manuscript to his agent, Dr Hawes said that he had tried to write a Catcher in the Rye for his generation.
Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape, said: "I thought this was the Holy Grail in that it's a very, very good literary novel, brilliantly written and very saleable ... It's the most I have ever paid for a first literary novel from an unknown author."
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