Jarred McGinnis
Jarred McGinnis is the co-founder of The Special Relationship, which was chosen for the British Council’s International Literature Showcase. His short fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and appeared in literary journals in the UK, Canada, USA and Ireland. He is an Associate Writer for Spread the Word, a fellow of the London Library’s Emerging Writer Programme and a Writer-in-Residence for First Story. He also has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, but mostly he inspires the able-bodied by using public transport and taking his daughters to the playground.
@JarredMcGinnis | jarredmcginnis.com
Jarred McGinnis’s debut novel The Coward, reviewed in the Guardian:
“Jarred’s days of being wheeled to the doughnut shop by his father, or flirting in vain with a barista named Sarah, are juxtaposed with his wild past of hopping boxcars and getting into bar fights: the result is unbearably poignant. The only way Jarred can survive it is with a lacerating gallows humour. Gags and merciless asides abound, all laced with the bitter truth of experience: ‘Paraplegia isn’t just the golden ticket to great parking and people’s condescension,’ he quips early on… The Coward is a truly uplifting emotional journey; a tender, wise, brutally funny novel that assiduously avoids the saccharine.”
Guardian
‘It is a novel, and I set that out very early… I new as someone in a wheelchair with a similar background to the main character I knew it’d always be conflated. So I call it kind of a land grab - I made the reader do the work, and kind of understand that to get to the book I wanted I had to y’know look at some very personal and intimite things in my life. And I couldn’t deny that the main character and I do share - he comes from me, and I didn’t want to have that degree of plausible denability that some other fiction writers utilise. I wanted to kind of admit that.’
Jarred McGinnis
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