Damned Utd

David Peace was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He attended Manchester Polytechnic from 1988-91 and got a BA in English. He taught English in Istanbul from 1992-1993 and then moved to Tokyo - where he has lived ever since.His work to date has concerned itself the Yorkshire of the 70s and 80s - the place and time in which he grew up. During the course of writing GB84, he found out that his great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather and his brothers were all miners. He also found out that many of them were killed in the Thornhill Mining disaster of 1983 - when 139 men were killed.He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet as well as GB84 and was included on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003.

You might think only football fans would appreciate this smart, punchy novel but you no more need a knowledge of the game's 1970s heyday than you need a detailed knowledge of employment law to enjoy Peace's miners' strike novel, GB84. Sunday Herald 20070506 This absorbing novel re-creates the voice of Brian Clough, one of England's most charismatic football managers, who specialised in turning small teams into spectacular overachievers. ... What emerges is a convincing portrait of a man motivated by setbacks and slights, who never felt happy winning, just a surge of vengeful pleasure -- Sameer Rahim Sunday Times 20070514 If Euripides had ever tried ghosting football memoirs he could not have done it better. -- Alfred Hickling Guardian 20070514 The Damned Utd is an overwrought, overblown, sliding tackle of a book. I loved it. -- Tony Saint Daily Telegraph 20070507 Peace is an inventive and atmospheric writer, setting his cheerless and tense story against the wider events of that year's two general elections and the Watergate scandal. -- Helen Zaltzman Observer 20070401 It is not every day I read a book which I then want to recommend to everyone. I got through The Damned United by David Peace in two gripping sessions. It is about - and written through the eyes of - Brian Clough during his disastrous 44 day tenure as manager of then champions Leeds United. It mixes fact and fiction sufficiently for it to be called a novel, but it brings to life not just a huge, dark and fascinating character, but also the era when football became something of an obsession for me. It also eases any concerns I have that my book has too much swearing in it. By comparison with the fictional Clough, my tongue is soap. -- Alastair Campbell