Cleave, Chris

The British writer and journalist Chris Cleave was born in London. Apart from a few years in Cameroon, West Africa, in the seventies where his father worked in a brewery, he was brought up in the London suburb of Hillingdon. Cleave was eight years old when he returned to England, and having lived in Africa he did not quite fit in among his peers. He later read psychology at Balliol College, Oxford. After having worked in a bar, as a navigation instructor, sailor and with internet start-ups in the nineties he decided he wanted to become a journalist and author. Chris Cleave lives in London with his wife and children. Chris Cleave published his first novel, Incendiary, in 2005. He wrote it during the US and British-led invasion of Iraq after it was revealed that Iraqi prisoners were tortured at Abu Ghraib prison, which led to 191 passengers being killed by a bomb on a train in Madrid. As a result, Spain withdrew their troops from Iraq. Cleave wanted to write a novel that would explain to his newly born son what kind of world he had been brought into. Incendiary is the story of a woman who loses her son in a similar attack in London. The woman in the novel addresses Osama bin Laden directly, but she is clever enough to realise that the West had some responsibility for the attacks.