Tibor Fischer

Tibor Fischer at Krasnoyarsk, 2012

Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959) is a British novelist and short story writer. In 1993, he was selected by the influential literary magazine Granta as one of the 20 best young British writers and Under the Frog became the first debut novel to feature on a Booker Prize shortlist.

Life and career

Fischer was born in Stockport, England. His parents were Hungarian basketball players, who fled Hungary in 1956. He studied French and Latin at Cambridge University. The bloody 1956 revolution, and his father's background, informed Fischer's debut novel Under the Frog, a Rabelaisian yarn about a Hungarian basketball player surviving Communism. The title is derived from a Hungarian saying, that the worst possible place to be is under a frog's arse down a coal mine.

In 1992, Under the Frog won a Betty Trask Prize for literature, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Fischer's subsequent novels have often featured dysfunctional central characters who eventually manage to achieve some kind of redemption. They include The Thought Gang, about a delinquent and alcoholic philosophy professor who hooks up with a failed one-armed bandit in France to form a successful team of bank robbers, and The Collector Collector, about a weekend in South London, narrated by a 5000-year-old Sumerian pot.

Fischer's novel, Voyage to the End of the Room was published in 2003, and concerned an agoraphobic ex-dancer.

His next novel, Good to be God was published by Alma Books on 4 September 2008. In it a broke, unemployed habitual failure uses his friend's credit card to start a new life in Florida, and decides that the fastest way to make a fortune would be to become a deity.

Fischer has also published a book of short stories, Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid (published in the U.S. as I Like Being Killed: Stories).

In 2009 Fischer became the Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at City and Guilds of London Art School.

Fischer is represented by Louise Greenberg Books Ltd.

Bibliography

Novels

• Under the Frog (1992)
• The Thought Gang (1994)
• The Collector Collector (1997)
• Voyage to the End of the Room (2003)
• Good to be God (2008)

Collections

• Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid (2000) (US title I Like Being Killed)
• Crushed Mexican Spiders (2011)

External links

• Tibor Fischer at the complete review
• Tibor Fischer at British Council: Literature
• Interview from 2004 at identitytheory