Jeremy Cooper, 77, was born in Dorset and lives in Somerset. An art historian who served as a guest expert on the Antiques Roadshow between 1979 and 1981, he’s the author of seven novels, three of them published since 2019, after he won Fitzcarraldo Editions’ novel prize (a book deal for an unpublished manuscript) with Ash Before Oak, a nature diary doubling as a “powerful… and very challenging” portrait of depression (Wall Street Journal). In his most recent book, Brian, a lonely council clerk finds solace in cinema-going. The actor Toby Jones has called it “the most extraordinary novel… the person who sent it to me did say: ‘You’d be great to play this part’”.
Where did Brian begin?
It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when I’d lived in London for nearly 20 years, that I discovered the joy of the National Film Theatre and its several cinemas, showing five or six different films every single day. I was intrigued by the sight each night of the same small group of regulars in a corner of the foyer. Speculation about the lives of these insular figures led many years later to the novel, which found its voice and form quickly over a matter of months in 2021.
How much research was required?
I didn’t do any research, nor for any other of my novels, all of which are around subjects I know and care about. Almost all the films which Brian sees I too have seen, none of them re-seen for writing the book. I’ve only ever watched film live on a cinema screen. The book was made possible in this form because, early in the process, I unearthed from the back of a cupboard the folder of information sheets I carefully kept of every film I saw from about 1985 until 2000 at the NFT [since 2007, BFI Southbank].
