John King (author)

John King is an English novelist who has written a number of books which, for the most part, deal in the more rebellious elements driving the country’s culture. His stories carry strong social and political undercurrents and his debut The Football Factory, published in 1996, was an instant word-of-mouth success, selling around 300,000 copies in the UK. The book was subsequently turned into a play by Brighton Theatre Events, with German and Dutch adaptations following. A high-profile film adaptation appeared in 2004. Directed by Nick Love and starring Danny Dyer, Dudley Sutton and Frank Harper, its UK DVD sales stand at nearly 2 million. Both novel and film attracted widespread media comment for their realism.

Prior to the novel’s release an early version of the chapter Millwall Away appeared in Rebel Inc. This magazine also published early writing by Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, and all three would subsequently join Jonathan Cape. King was producing the fanzine Two Sevens with Peter Mason at this time (Mason would go on to author The Brown Dog Affair, among other books), and Rebel Inc editor Kevin Williamson’s fiction was featured, along with interviews with Welsh and London novelist Stewart Home. Following its publication, extracts from The Football Factory featured in issue 59 of the New York literary journal Grand Street.

Two more novels – Headhunters and England Away – develop the themes of alienation and belonging to be found in The Football Factory. These three books form a loose trilogy with story lines found in The Football Factory and Headhunters converging in England Away. The Big Issue described Headhunters as: “Sexy, dirty, violent, sad and funny; in fact it has just about everything you could want from a book on contemporary working-class life in London”. Reviewing England Away, Chris Searle of The Morning Star wrote: “The words of Wilfred Owen come pounding through King’s prose: ‘I was the enemy you killed, my friend’.”

King's fourth novel – Human Punk – is believed to be his most autobiographical. Set in and around Slough, The Independent’s Gareth Evans wrote: “The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences... In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.”

White Trash (2002), which the author has described as “a defence of the NHS”, drew the following praise from Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: “Complete and unique, all stitched up and marvellous, the two sides of the equation brought together, realistic yet philosophical.” In The Independent, Mat Coward wrote: “The cumulative effect of King’s style, with streams of monologue, alternating between Ruby and Jeffreys, is astonishingly powerful in its detail and depth... This is an immensely timely and necessary book: stylish, witty and passionate. It’s about time someone slapped the smugness from the face of broadsheet Britain.”

Skinheads (2008) is set in the same landscapes as Human Punk and White Trash, and while the three books feature different characters, they effectively combine to provide an overview of forty years of British culture and politics as The Satellite Cycle. In his review of the novel, Charles Shaar Murray stated: “John King’s achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely literature.” The US edition of Human Punk carries the following quote by Lars Frederiksen of the American punk band Rancid: “John King: the face in our subculture who lives what he writes.”

The one novel of King's to be set entirely outside England – The Prison House – is considered his most mature work to date. Brian Keenan wrote: “With a brutal imagination The Prison House takes you to a place where angels fear to tread. Go there and be redeemed.” Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, said: “In this literary jail, the ghost of Kafka shares a cell with the shade of Burroughs.” An album based on the novel, written by King and Ruts DC guitarist Leigh Heggarty, has been reported.

His books have been widely translated abroad, with France, Italy and Russia among those countries to have released all his titles. In 2014, Inter fans on the Curva Nord unveiled a stadium-wide banner featuring a quote from The Football Factory as they protested against the treatment of Italian supporters by television and business interests. In 2016 a specially commissioned text appeared with a photograph of George Best as part of the Football De Legendes exhibition held in front of the Hotel De Ville in Paris, organised to celebrate the Euro 2106 tournament being held in France.

In 2007, King set up the independent publishing company London Books with Martin Knight, and their London Classics series has established itself as a focal point for London's ignored tradition of working-class fiction. King edits a London Classics list that includes authors Gerald Kersh, James Curtis and Robert Westerby, along with introductions by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades. He puts on Human Punk nights at the 100 Club in Central London with the DJs Andy Attic and Gene Putney. Among others, Human Punk has featured Sham 69, Ruts DC, Cockney Rejects and The Last Resort.

King has written for a number of alternative publications and fanzines over the years, and has contributed to The New Statesman in the UK, La Repubblica in Italy and Le Monde in France. He also edits the fiction fanzine Verbal. A supporter of British withdrawal from the EU, his New Statesman articles on the subject – A Very Corporate Coup and Flying The Flag – were widely commented upon. This was followed by The People Versus The Elite (Penguin) and the release of his eighth novel, The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler (2016).

Set fifty years in the future, The Morning Star wrote: “King steadily constructs, layer by layer, an increasingly believable world where a combination of intrusive technology, ruthlessness and effectively bland public relations has ensured the domination of the majority’s thoughts and actions.” Trade Unionists Against The EU called the book: “Brave, imaginative fiction. An important political novel that is supremely relevant to our turbulent times.” A new novel – Slaughterhouse Prayer – is due to be published in 2017.