John Logan, born in Glasgow 1967. Graduated Aberdeen University MA (Honours) English 1994.

Current income comes from writing and a farm I own which my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather lived and worked on since 1906.

Publication history:

Sometimes All the World Comes Down published by Picador in the British Council anthology, New Writing 13, edited by Ali Smith and Toby Litt, the book was sold in most countries of the world.  

I was mentioned in a review of the book by Ashok K Banker published in The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, and my story was quoted in an article by Stephen Abell in The Spectator. Payment for the story was £400. 

Tortoises and Bats published by Vintage in the British Council anthology, New Writing 9, edited by A L Kennedy and John Fowles, this book was also sold in most countries.

I was mentioned in a review in Scotland on Sunday by Catherine Lockerbie. Payment £165.

Bringing Something Back, published in Edinburgh Review Issue 109, payment £60.

I was also invited by Edinburgh Review to perform a reading of this story at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, payment £75 for reading, plus £80 expenses.   

Click on Bold Italic Links to Read a Story or Two.

Other Languages, published in Edinburgh Review Issue 107, payment £60.

Circles within Circles, a 6000 word extract from a novella called The Major, was published in Edinburgh Review Issue 113, payment £60.  

New Deal for the New Writer, published in Edinburgh Review Issue 110, under the pseudonym Donald Ross, payment £60.  

The Day Billy Bear's Mum Sent Him to Sign On, published in Chapman Issue 93, payment £15.  

Fat Pig and Thin Oinker, published in Northwords Issue 25, payment £25.  

Not to be the First Caught, published in Northwords Issue 20/21, payment £25.  

Perve Meets Perve, published in Northwords Issue 15, gratis.  

The Highland Shark, published in Nomad Issue 13, payment £20.  

Natural Causes, published in Nomad Issue 17-18, payment £25.  

The Emotion, published in Secrets of a View, gratis.  

I also self-published a novel through iUniverse, called Bringing Something Back.  

Dr David Moses' 1500 word review of Bringing Something Back appeared in Scottish Studies Review, Spring 2005. 

In the 2nd edition of Bringing Something Back, I placed this excerpt from his review on the back cover:

“ Logan writes in very original terms...the ‘death thread’ resonates throughout the book...the various physical and mental crises the narrator goes through ring only too true."

The novelist, Alan Warner, also gave me a sentence of endorsement which now appears on the book's front cover: "A blistering, tough book, tempered by tenderness and mystery."  

Bringing Something Back was stocked locally in Ottakars and W H Smith, and is still available to buy at Amazon.com.

After the 2nd edition of Bringing Something Back, and the Picador anthology, New Writing 13, were published, I stopped publishing and took time instead to concentrate on completing 3 more novels:

Agency Woman,

Starnegin's Camp,  

and

The Survival of Thomas Ford.

JOHN'S FAVORITE NOVELS:

"The best novel I’ve ever read. Best bits: when he’s writing outside and there are insects on the paper and he can’t blow them off because he thinks they are squatting down and bracing their heels against the commas on the paper; when he lies to a butcher to get a bone and tries to gnaw on it because he’s starving but it makes him sick and he retches while cursing God; when he sees the woman he’s Christened Ylayali for the last time and what he says to her as he leaves her house." 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT - Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Starts like ‘Hunger’, with a young man trying to avoid his landlady because he can’t pay the rent (that’s how John Fante’s great 1939 novel, ‘Ask the Dust’, starts too, so someone should identify the 3 as a trilogy)." 

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA - Mikhail Bulgakov

"Came across it by accident on a Waterstone’s bookshelf. Back cover blurb said the devil comes to Moscow with 2 demons, a naked girl, and a huge black cat. Not published until 28 years after Bulgakov died. He spent the last 6 years of a short life drafting and re-drafting this book. When he went blind he kept working on it, by dictation. 2nd best novel I’ve ever read. The cat freaks me out. I want to read Bulgakov’s first novel sometime, the one where a scientist implants the pituitary gland and testicles of a human being into a dog in 1920s Russia and the dog becomes a total psycho-hedonist-bastard. I’m scared to read it though, in case it’s not as beautiful as 'Master and Margarita.'" 

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - Milan Kundera

"This book caught my attention and respect when I read Kundera’s perfect and haunting definition of vertigo. I think of it whenever I’m in a high place ever since." 

THE STAND - Stephen King

"Read it in 1982 when at school. The book totally stunned me. I still love it, like the dog’s thoughts in italics when the dog, Kojak (or Big Steve) is in pain and he thinks it’s wasps stinging him." 

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE - Robert Pirsig

"A man gets locked up and given electro-shock treatments until half his personality is gone. He gets out, rebuilds his mind, writes the book, has it accepted by the 123rd publisher he posts it out to." 

LAGOON AND OTHER STORIES - Janet Frame

"Frame was in hospital all lined up for a lobotomy, signed for by her parents who’d been talked into it by the docs. Just before the op this book won a national prize in New Zealand and she was suddenly too famous to cut her brain to pieces. Note: the book had been published already, so publication does not save you from radical psychiatric intervention … one’s book must also win a national prize. Later, having escaped to London, the London docs told her there had never been anything wrong with her, she’d been “misdiagnosed” as schizophrenic by the Kiwi docs. The lagoon stories have a lucid beauty seldom found in the brain of psychiatrists." 

"Sharp went on to write Hollywood screenplays like 'Night Moves' in 1975 with Gene Hackman. But I prefer this stunning, perfect, taut novel by Greenock’s finest novelist. Best bit: when someone glimpses their own foot unawares and can’t identify with it as their foot. Ha ha…I’ve butcherd it…you’d have to read it yourself of course." 

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND - Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Unbelievable that this was published or written in 1864, while most other novels were poncing around. His reaction when he perceives insults from the group of young men; the stuff he says to the prostitute in part 2…it took 100 years for British or American writing to catch up with the psychological honesty and complexity…some of it has caught up anyway…a lot still hasn’t." 

FREE FALL - William Golding

"I came across ‘Lord of the Flies’ too young, force-fed it at school, so I’ve never looked at it again I was put off it so much. But I saw this book by accident and read it like lightning. Best bits: when the prisoner-of-war sees a human being after being locked away for so long that he can’t understand that all the light and movement and spirit in front of him is a person; and when a guy visits an ex-girlfriend in mental hospital and all her hair is cut short and he sees the shape of her skull for the first time ever and the skull is much smaller than all her long hair had made him always assume." 

DARKNESS VISIBLE - William Golding

"I was sent this by someone who came across it free and the note with the book said “it’s probably not the best novel in the world but it was free”. But it was one of the best I’ve read." 

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT - Jeanette Winterson

"I knew I’d like it when she listed the things on “her family’s side” and there was “our dog” in the list." 

THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963) Dir: Lindsay Anderson

"Harris got his Best Actor at Cannes for it and mentioned it in every interview for the next 39 years…what does the spider mean at the end I always wonder…" 

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981) Dir: Louis Malle

"Hypno-cinema" 

EQUUS (1977) Dir: Sidney Lumet

"Typical boy-horse romance." 

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1979) Dir: William Peter Blatty

"Based on his own novel. I saw this about 8 times between ages 9 and 32 before I seriously asked myself was this film taking the piss? I love it though. Didn’t know for years that Blatty is the man who wrote ‘The Exorcist novel’." 

MEDIUM COOL (1969) Dir: Haskell Wexler

"Just brilliant…shows what American films could have been like for the past 40 years if Hollywood hadn’t made it into big business monopoly." 

"You can tell Schlesinger started out making adverts…the honest vibe Voight and Hoffman manage to inject into the film makes it timeless." 

"The only film Laughton ever made…haunting and stunning. The children going downriver on the boat filmed through spider’s webs at the riverside…the old woman seeing the rabbit killed and saying to the child, “it’s a hard world for small things”." 

"Connery and Ian Bannen at close quarters…later Connery would say that Lumet “went all European on us”…i.e. psychological drama?"

"Suicidal man meets angel..and James Stewart’s first film after years spent in a plane flying bombing missions over German cities…if you watch closely you can see his soul twitching. Magic to watch for the first time by accident on tv when you’re a child. Then the serious stuff becomes clearer every time you see it again. Harder to catch by accident on tv in an age of property/cookery programmes though." 

CINDERELLA LIBERTY (1973) Dir: Mark Rydell

"realism and an early revelation of the American underbelly where the single mother prostitute has to let her son chew tobacco to numb the pain of the rotting teeth they can’t afford to treat. James Caan at his peak of sullen attitude and repressed rage." 

"So good they had to ban it in Inverness…Willem Dafoe bringing not peace but a sword."