Dominic Cooper (author)

Dominic Cooper (born 1944) is a British novelist, poet and watchmaker. He won the Somerset Maugham Award for his novel The Dead of Winter (1975).

Background & career

Born near Winchester, he is the son of musicologist Martin Cooper and artist Mary Cooper.

After university, he worked in London for the Decca Record Company and for the publishers, Fabbri & Partners. In 1970, he went to live in Iceland, began to concentrate on writing, and taught English in a language school in Reykjavík to earn a living.

In 1972, he moved to Sweden and then to the Isle of Mull in Argyll, Scotland, where he drew inspiration from the landscape and people to write his first novel, The Dead of Winter, published in 1975.^[1] This won him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.^[2]

Little of his poetry has been published, but commenting on the poetic quality of his fiction, he has said: ″By nature I feel myself to be first and foremost a poet ... but poetry for me has always been an essentially private affair and I have never felt any great need for it to be published.″^[3]

He has described writing his fourth book, The Horn Fellow, set in Northern Europe around 500 BC,^[4] as “perhaps the greatest experience of my life” and its publication as being met “with a mixture of incomprehension and vague ridicule”.^[5] He has written little during the intervening years.

In 1973 he undertook training in horology in Edinburgh and since then he has worked restoring clocks and watches. He returned to the West Highlands in 1985 and soon afterwards built himself a house on a remote part of the North Argyll coast where he now lives.

Works

The Dead of Winter

Chatto & Windus 1975

St Martin’s Press, NY 1975

Faber & Faber 1985

Thirsty Press 2010

Italian edition, Einaudi 1989

Spanish edition, Mario Muchnik 2003

French edition, Métailié 2006

Somerset Maugham Award 1976

Sunrise

Chatto & Windus 1977

Faber & Faber 1985

Men at Axlir

Chatto & Windus 1978

St Martin’s Press, NY 1978

Collins Harvill 1988

Icelandic edition, Örn og Örlygur 1980

The Horn Fellow

Faber & Faber 1987

Jack Fletcher

Encounter 1978

Judgements of Value (editor)

OUP 1988

The Open Places (essay)

self-published 1989

also short stories, poems, essays and the script for Jack Fletcher, BBC TV 1979.

References

1. Newspaper reviews include: C J Driver in The Guardian 17.04.1975, Jeremy Brooks in The Financial Times 18.04.1975, New Statesman 18.04.1975 and James Allan Ford in The Scotsman 19.04.1975
2. Somerset Maugham award winners
3. See interview with Yves Loisel of Le Télégramme published 31.03.2007 .
4. Skinner, Alison. Prehistory - the literary dimension, describes the book in section on modern writers: .
5. from archived, unabridged interview supporting article of 31.03.2007 .