Nominated for the 2010 Portico Prize for FictionBumping, set on contemporary Tyneside, interweaves three stories. Each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The 'bumping' of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one character's passion for recreational lock-picking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged way leave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry; and the heart-breakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. The novel's themes include relationships with home and place, male preoccupation with mechanisms and systems, moral evasion, and the tyranny of random events. Bumping is about obsession and longing on contemporary Tyneside. It is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock picking and Californian ladybirds."Edgy, occasionally funny, sometimes dark... reveals [an] amazing eye for detail... [the sections on teenagers] Barry and Nicky and [senile old man] Tom, are classics."The Morning StarTony Bianchi was born and grew up in North Shields, on Tyneside. Formerly Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales, he is now a freelance writer, translator and arts consultant and lives in Cardiff. He has won prizes for his Welsh-language fiction, including the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize and nominations for the Welsh Book of the Year.

Tracing life from a childhood in an Italian-English family on Tyneside to becoming a Welsh-speaking freelance writer in Cardiff, Eisteddfod-winning author Tony Bianchi leads the reader through a series of increasingly bizarre vignettes. Each section is a free-standing short story but read together they form a ludic, untrustworthy autobiography where the rug of humdrum normality is constantly pulled from under our feet. Lured into trusting belief by the narrator's direct, confiding tone, by the sometimes overwhelming weight of circumstantial geographical and historical detail, and by the photos and documents that seem to guarantee authenticity, again and again the reader is suddenly left rudderless, unsure of the boundaries between truth and fiction. Did Bianchi ever play football in a Cardiff park with notorious Serbian war-lord Arkan? Is the floor of his local pub a concrete realisation of an M.C. Escher painting?In England, Wales, and beyond, Bianchi introduces a series of extraordinary characters, from the devout, indulgence-collecting, organ-playing grandfather, to the plumber and Cumbrian nationalist Caedmon, or the piano-playing pharmacist with carpal tunnel syndrome. And whether at the centre of the narrative or reporting from the sidelines, there, constantly leading us on from one potentially disastrous situation to another, is the author as anti-hero, always earnestly self-deprecating, always reinventing himself, always challenging our assumptions about identity, time and memory.

Nominated for the 2010 Portico Prize for FictionBumping, set on contemporary Tyneside, interweaves three stories. Each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The 'bumping' of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one character's passion for recreational lock-picking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged way leave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry; and the heart-breakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. The novel's themes include relationships with home and place, male preoccupation with mechanisms and systems, moral evasion, and the tyranny of random events. Bumping is about obsession and longing on contemporary Tyneside. It is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock picking and Californian ladybirds."Edgy, occasionally funny, sometimes dark... reveals [an] amazing eye for detail... [the sections on teenagers] Barry and Nicky and [senile old man] Tom, are classics."The Morning StarTony Bianchi was born and grew up in North Shields, on Tyneside. Formerly Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales, he is now a freelance writer, translator and arts consultant and lives in Cardiff. He has won prizes for his Welsh-language fiction, including the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize and nominations for the Welsh Book of the Year.

Tracing life from a childhood in an Italian-English family on Tyneside to becoming a Welsh-speaking freelance writer in Cardiff, Eisteddfod-winning author Tony Bianchi leads the reader through a series of increasingly bizarre vignettes. Each section is a free-standing short story but read together they form a ludic, untrustworthy autobiography where the rug of humdrum normality is constantly pulled from under our feet. Lured into trusting belief by the narrator's direct, confiding tone, by the sometimes overwhelming weight of circumstantial geographical and historical detail, and by the photos and documents that seem to guarantee authenticity, again and again the reader is suddenly left rudderless, unsure of the boundaries between truth and fiction. Did Bianchi ever play football in a Cardiff park with notorious Serbian war-lord Arkan? Is the floor of his local pub a concrete realisation of an M.C. Escher painting?In England, Wales, and beyond, Bianchi introduces a series of extraordinary characters, from the devout, indulgence-collecting, organ-playing grandfather, to the plumber and Cumbrian nationalist Caedmon, or the piano-playing pharmacist with carpal tunnel syndrome. And whether at the centre of the narrative or reporting from the sidelines, there, constantly leading us on from one potentially disastrous situation to another, is the author as anti-hero, always earnestly self-deprecating, always reinventing himself, always challenging our assumptions about identity, time and memory.