Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy (born May 22, 1969) is an English writer and artist. In the wake of Brexit, he gained Swedish citizenship. His debut novel, Remainder, was published in 2005. McCarthy has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University in 2013. He won a Believer Book Award for Remainder in 2008.

He has also written a critical study of Tintin called Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and published an essay collection, Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish, in 2017. His most recent novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.

Life and work

Tom McCarthy was born in London in 1969 and lives in Berlin. His father, Sir Callum McCarthy, worked in the financial sector. He was a civil servant, first in the Department of Trade and Industry, and then (his last decade of work) as a financial regulator. Tom McCarthy grew up in Greenwich, and was educated at Dulwich College from 1978 to 1986 and later New College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He lived in Prague, where he worked as a nude model and in an American bar; Berlin, where he worked in an Irish pub; and Amsterdam, where he worked in a restaurant kitchen and reviewed books for the local edition of Time Out magazine in the early 90s, before moving back to London. McCarthy's time in Prague forms the basis for his novel Men in Space. McCarthy has also worked as a television script editor, and co-edited Mute magazine. Since 2022, McCarthy held the post of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, alongside Ted Chiang and Andrea Wulf. Prior to moving to Berlin, he lived and wrote in a tower block flat on the Golden Lane Estate beside the Barbican.

Writing and publishing

McCarthy's debut novel Remainder was written in 2001 and rejected by all the UK publishers to which it was submitted. It was published in November 2005 by the small Paris-based art publisher Metronome Press and distributed through gallery and museum shops, but not in chain bookstores and then received widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream press, with one of its first reviews, in December 2005, on ReadySteadyBook who called it "one of the most important novels written in a long, long time." The London Review of Books called it "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent claimed that "its minatory brilliance calls for classic status". The novel was re-published by the independent publisher Alma Books in the UK (2006), and the Bertelsmann subsidiary Vintage in the US (2007), where it ranked as an Amazon top one-hundred seller and entered the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. On its American publication the New York Times dedicated the front cover of its book section to the novel, calling the book "a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny". In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award. Zadie Smith wrote in the New York Review of Books that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years", suggesting it showed a future path that the novel "might, with difficulty, follow". It has since been translated into fourteen languages, and a film adaptation directed by Omer Fast was released in 2015. Several big publishing houses who had rejected the novel returned to him with enthusiastic offers, which McCarthy rejected, commenting that "it's the same book as it was two years ago."

A work of literary criticism by McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006, with French (Hachette Littératures), Spanish (El Tercer Nombre), Italian (Piemme) and American editions (Counterpoint) following in 2007-8. The book attempted a reading of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory. It divided reviewers, with some critics disliking the book's references to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Killian Fox in The Observer praised "its author's obsessive approach, his breathtaking grasp of the oeuvre and the sheer exuberance with which he tackles his subject". However, in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes criticised its methodology and style: "McCarthy's text has that pleased-with-itself smirk that was so characteristic of the early 90s, when journalists started purloining critical theory from the academy, liking the way it made them feel clever". McCarthy commented: "Granta asked if I wanted to write a book on Freud or Derrida or someone like that, and I said: 'Well, if I write about Hergé I can write about Freud, Derrida and whole bunch of other people, plus it'll be much more fun.' It was received well for the most part. There were one or two hilarious English reviews in which you could virtually see the reviewer's veins bursting with little-England rage at the book's continental bent."

In 2007, Alma Books published his second novel, Men in Space, much of which was written prior to Remainder. It has since been published in many languages including Greek and French. McCarthy has also published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Artforum, and The New York Times., as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Reenactment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent's Tail).