John Noone

JOHN NOONE is a British writer, born in 1936. He was raised in Darlington, County Durham, in the north-east of England, the third of six children. His paternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant from County Mayo who settled in Cumberland towards the end of the 19th century, and his other grandparents were Cumbrian of Scots descent. He was educated locally at Roman Catholic primary and grammar schools, completed his National Service in the Durham Light Infantry and graduated from King's College, Newcastle, then part of Durham University. While in the army he served in the Suez Canal Zone and in 1961 returned to Egypt as lecturer at Alexandria University. Since then, apart from a couple of years in the late sixties, he has lived outside of the UK, lecturing in English literature and culture until 1976, notably under the aegis of the British Council in the University of Benghazi, Libya, and in the University of Kyoto, Japan. It was in Kyoto that he met his present wife, a francophone Belgian from Brussels, and they have been resident in France since 1980, though their travels have taken them to all parts of the world. His wife has two daughters and he a son by previous marriages.

His first novel, THE MAN WITH THE CHOCOLATE EGG, was joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1967, and his second novel THE NIGHT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT, received an Arts Council Award in 1974. His short stories were published variously in the 1980s and 90s but were not brought together in the collection, LIKE AS NOT, until recently. THE MAN BEHIND THE IRON MASK, a work of historical detection, hailed in France as "the Copernican revolution" of Iron Mask studies, was published in 1988, revised in 1994 and again in a new edition in 2003. His latest work, a monograph in two volumes published on Kindle in March 2013 and entitled TURTLE TORTOISE, IMAGE AND SYMBOL, is the product of thirty-five years as curator of the privately owned Forani Collection of the Turtle in Art and Artifact.