“Newton combines strange and vivid creations with very real and pressing concerns with estimable commitment and passion.”
— China Miéville on City of Ruin
[If you want author photos, step this way.]
I was born in 1981 to an Indian mother and an English father. (That’s why I’ve got a strange middle name that no one seems to be able to pronounce.) I took a degree in Environmental Science, and plans for further study were interrupted by getting a very fun job in a bookshop, which was part of the chain Ottakar’s. At the time I lived in a caravan – I needed somewhere cheap, very quickly, and I wasn’t made of money. When I should have been thinking of getting a better-paid job, and after reading China Miéville’s The Scar, I thought I’d give this writing malarkey a go.
When I was 23 years old I took a lateral move into publishing, working as an editor for an imprint called Black Flame, which published media tie-in fiction for the franchises New Line Cinema and 2000 AD. A couple of years later, I helped create Solaris, a mass market, original SF, Fantasy and Horror imprint. A few of us built it from scratch, and were soon making waves in the industry on both sides of the Atlantic, before we sold the imprint in 2009 (I no longer work for them). I currently live in Nottingham, UK, a city surrounded by ex-mining villages which were razed to the ground by a witch (more or less).
In 2007, World rights for two of my novels were sold to Pater Lavery at Pan Macmillan (Tor UK), which is why I’m writing all this now. My UK editor at Pan Mac is Julie Crisp (who in 2009 bought two more novels), and my US editor at Random House is Chris Schluep. If you’re mad enough to contact me, then please send an email to mark [at] markcnewton [dot] com. I’m afraid I’m unable to take a look at any manuscripts you might have – I barely have the time to check my own. Plus there’s a whole load of other stuff to think about. The start of this film comes to mind, though certainly not the ending.
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House rules: the Internet is full of crazies, and if there are any comments that happen to come from crazies, I’m afraid I will delete them, unless they’re amusing at their own expense. Funnily enough I don’t invite people into my front room to give abuse, so I won’t do it online either. I’ve been amazed at how good the debates have been on this site, so it’d be great to keep things that way. I’ll write about things other than books – politics, the environment, music – because, well, there’s also a world outside of our genre. And you can talk back to me about it, too – that’s cool.
A quite note: I won’t engage in flame wars – because it’s the Internet, and I know how silly it all is. You should know that all internet arguments end up with this level of etiquette.
Nothing I say represents the opinions of my employer. My thoughts are entirely my own, and if linked to, should be attributed specifically to Mark Charan Newton.
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