About Julian

Julian Gough is the author of five beloved children’s books about a rabbit and a bear, four acclaimed novels about human beings, a couple of BBC radio plays about God knows what, and a charming stage play about an economic catastrophe caused by goats. He also wrote the ending to the computer game Minecraft (a mysterious narrative popularly known as the End Poem).

Right now, he is writing a new non-fiction book about the universe, called The Egg and the Rock, in public. It is the best thing he has ever done: you can subscribe by clicking on this link, to be sent each new part as he writes it, for free. There is a reasonably high chance it will blow your mind. (If it does not blow your mind – or if you don’t like having your mind blown – no problem, just unsubscribe.)

In his youth, he sang with underground literary pop band Toasted Heretic on four albums, and had a top ten hit in Ireland with the single Galway and Los Angeles. He won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2007, and was shortlisted, twice, for the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize. A poetry collection, Free Sex Chocolate, was published in 2010, and in 2013 he had a UK number one Kindle Single with the comic novella CRASH! His most recent novel, Connect, was published by Picador in 2018.

His Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated by the great Jim Field) are now published in over thirty languages. The first book, Rabbit's Bad Habits, was shortlisted for an Irish Book of the Year Award in 2016; its French translation won the Prix Livrentête in 2018. The sequel, The Pest in the Nest, was shortlisted for both an Irish Book of the Year Award, and the Sainsbury’s Children’s Book Award.

Julian has also been writer in residence in Trinity College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

He is currently working on a couple of children’s books, and, as mentioned above, his first non-fiction book, The Egg and the Rock. That book redescribes the universe, using the techniques of a novelist to extract meaning from the most interesting scientific papers of the past thirty years. (The Egg and the Rock will probably be of particular interest to fans of his last novel, the near-future thriller Connect, and to those who enjoyed the End Poem he wrote for Minecraft. It might also appeal to fans of such books as Iain McGilchrist’s fascinating The Master and His Emissary, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s magnificent Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, or Rupert Sheldrake’s gloriously dry critique of reductionist materialism, The Science Delusion.) He is currently writing it in public on Substack. You can click on this link to subscribe for free, and get each new part emailed to you as he writes it.

He can be contacted through his agent, Charlie Campbell, of Greyhound Literary; directly on Twitter, where he is @juliangough; or at his personal email address through this form on the Contact page.