Alex Garland
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Alex Garland was born in 1970, son of the well-known and respected political cartoonist, Nick Garland. With a resolutely middle-class and intellectual background, he attended University College School, Hampstead and later graduated from Manchester University with a degree in History of Art, and was planning on following in a his fathers footsteps before he realized: "There aren't many openings for a cartoonist." Instead, he turned his attention to fiction, and started writing The Beach when he was just 23, drawing on his many experiences of travelling (he first went to India when he was 17, on a school trip, and he now makes several visits to South East Asia per year.)
The Beach (1996). The novel, set in what at first seems to be a backpackers' paradise in Thailand, ascends to a visceral Lord of the Flies for our times. The novel was boosted by the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio in the main role as Richard.
The Tesseract (1998) intertwines the lives of Manila gangsters, housewives and streetchildren. The title, referring to the four-dimensional hypercube, signifies our inability to understand the world at any level higher than our own existence.
The Coma (2004) tells the story of man after he is brutally beaten in an attempt to protect a young woman from a gang of thugs. After awakening from his coma and being discharged from hospital the man proceeds to piece his life together, often wondering if he really has slipped out of the coma or is merely dreaming. It is illustrated with woodcuts by his father, Nicholas.
Garland wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyle's 2003 movie 28 Days Later set in a post-apocalyptic England. Garland recently wrote a movie script for the vastly popular Halo: Combat Evolved video game, for the corporate giant Microsoft, for a reported sum of 1 million dollars.
External Links
- Backpacker Blues: Spike Magazine interview with Alex Garland (http://www.spikemagazine.com/0599alexgarland.php)de:Alex Garland