Ken Champion – författare

In his expansive new novel, Champion confidently strides the global stage cleverly inter-linking three lives as he reflects on relationships, work, community and what success means for people and places in the fragile, crash-and-burn economy of the 20th Century. At times angry, funny, touching and tender, THRUST is a compelling read posing huge questions that demand our full attention.’

Opening amongst the narrow, grimy, tree-free streets of 1930s East London where his titular hero is growing up and making sense of his world in the run-up to war, Champion brilliantly captures the claustrophobic life of work, traditional gender roles and family amongst the white working class that once dominated these neighbourhoods, deploying his mastery of conversation to powerful effect as he anatomises the rules, restrictions and unspoken resentments that define a tightly bounded, long lost world. A second narrative, initially located in New York, collides with the first in rural East Anglia which sees a blue collar lecturer on an intellectual journey that probes identity and the inherent contradictions between nature and nurture. Once again, Champion has produced a clever novel that is both distinctive and profoundly unsettling, exposing the emotional emptiness of both the superficially cheery cockney culture and the loquacious, self- regarding grove of academe.

Ken Champion is a writer, novelist, poet and reviewer who is the author of 3 novels, 2 novellas, and this volume of short stories, as well as 2 poetry pamphlets and 2 full collections. His work has also appeared in literary journals in the US and extensively in magazines and anthologies in the UK.

This is Ken Champion’s best novel to date. Tightly written and surprising, its main character, Vincent, is one of the author’s ’ vivid working class men who, after a university education, lives a life at once rich in social observation and sense perceptions and awash with anger at a world that doesn''t allow any real integration between his roots and present life. A professor of racially diverse adult students and a wanderer through London, Vincent begins an emotionally intriguing journey with a woman who lives in the vintage clothes of a past era, the story line following their relationship. The end is determined both by Vincent’s dissatisfactions and by the shock of the brutal, random events of real life. It’s an unusual, gripping book.

‘If you’re expecting to read titles of comparative texts by well known writers littered throughout a tribute to Ken Champion, you are mistaken - he’s not that kind of writer. The author is rare amongst his peers in social and literary relevance for he can present the lost, the mistaken, the sophistication doggedly clung to in despair and bring into being the deepest, unspoken tenderness. Following the psycho-geography of much of Urban Narratives, a story collection whose exploration of themes and ideas are broadened into similarly disturbed planes in The Dramaturgical Metaphor, Champion introduces a protagonist randomly and artfully directing Kundera-esque scenarios across Europe to escape from a damaged ego while searching for an idealised one. This new novella is not only to be admired for its style and pace, but to be felt, to be angry at.’

There are all the joys of Ken Champion’s writing here – a vivid depiction of time and place created with painterly skill, telling humour and characters both bound by and railing against society’s expectations. This is a world rich and busy with the banter, camaraderie and cruelty of daily life, with painful truths beneath.At its heart is the story of Ben, coming of age in the East End of the fifties, whose encounter with the adventurous, liberated Beat Years is merely glanced in the pages of Kerouac’s On The Road. His struggle to move beyond the grey predictability and stifling life mapped out for him is shown through his drifting friendship with Johnny who shares his urge to escape and the desire to explore beyond the limits of what’s expected. But both learn that freedom isn''t so easy; chances glide past, becoming the roads not travelled as Ben’s life is defined by the choices he makes.