Earls, Nick 1963–

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Earls, Nick 1963–

PERSONAL: Born October 8, 1963, in Newtownards, Northern Ireland; son of John (a management consultant) and Angela (a medical practitioner) Earls; married Sarah Garvey (a legal policy officer), April 13, 1991. Education: University of Queensland, M.B.B.S. (second-class honors), 1986.

ADDRESSES: Home—Queensland, Australia. Agent—Curtis Brown, P.O. Box 19, Paddington, New South Wales 2021, Australia. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Medical practitioner in Brisbane, Queensland, 1987–94; freelance writer, 1988–. Continuing medical education editor, Medical Observer, Queensland, 1994–. Australian ambassador for nonprofit group War Child.

AWARDS, HONORS: Steele Rudd Award runner-up, 1993, for Passion; 3M Talking Book of the Year Award (Young People's Category), 1996, and CBE/International Youth Library (Munich) Notable Book, 1997, both for After January; shortlisted for Talking Book of the Year Award, 1997, for Zigzag Street; Australian Children's Book of the Year Award—Older Readers, 2000, for Forty-eight Shades of Brown; 2003 Centenary Medal for service to the arts, Australia; Queensland's Multicultural Champion Award, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Passion (short stories), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Australia), 1992.

After January (young adult novel), University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Australia), 1996, published as After Summer, Graphia (Boston, MA), 2005.

Zigzag Street (novel), Anchor (New York, NY), 1997.

Bachelor Kisses, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1998.

(With Sonya Hartnett and Heide Seaman) There Must Be Lions: Stories about Mental Illness, Ginninderra Press (Charnwood, Australia), 1998.

Forty-eight Shades of Brown, Penguin Books (Ringwood, Australia), 1999, Graphia (Boston, MA), 2004.

Headgames, Viking (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1999.

Perfect Skin, Viking (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 2000, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Solid Gold: Bachelor Kisses, Perfect Skin, Viking (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 2000.

World of Chickens, Viking (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 2001, published as Two to Go, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Making Laws for Clouds, Penguin (Camberwell, Australia), 2002.

(Editor, with Jessica Adams and Juliet Partridge) Kid's Night In, Puffin (Camberwell, Australia), 2003.

The Thompson Gunner, Penguin (Camberwell, Australia), 2004.

Monica Bloom, Penguin (Camberwell, Australia), 2006.

Wrote and recorded the album Ten Things You Should Know about Sex; contributor of short fiction to anthologies, including Nightmares in Paradise, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Australia), 1995.

ADAPTATIONS: Philip Dean has adapted several of Earls's works for the stage, including Zigzag Street, After January, and Forty-eight Shades of Brown, all of which are available from Currency Press. Janis Balodis adapted Perfect Skin for the stage, which is also available from Currency Press.

SIDELIGHTS: Australian fiction writer Nick Earls gained attention with the successful young adult novel After January, which was hailed by both critics and readers after its publication in 1996. Praising Earls's book as "the sort of teenage novel I believe needs to be published," Robyn Sheahan remarked in Viewpoint that "After January is the beginning of a new kind of Australian teenage novel, one which recognises that adolescence does not end at seventeen, that there are still crucial paths to be negotiated between childhood and adulthood." In addition to After January, Earls is the author of the 1996 adult novel Zigzag Street, and a short story collection titled Passion, which was published in 1992.

A short-story writer and freelance advertising copywriter, Earls never thought he would be writing for the teen market. Then, "late in 1993, I was asked to write a short story for the fifteen to eighteen age group," he once explained. "I was reluctant to try, because I didn't know the market, but the editor persuaded me. She suggested I come up with a central character in this age group, and approach the story simply as a piece of fiction. 'Remember what you were like when you were that age,' she told me, and I could. Sometimes far too easily.

"While, from the outside, I might have looked like a fairly competent seventeen year old, that hadn't always been how I'd felt. So I could remember all kinds of insecurities and perceived inadequacies and routine moments of desperation. In fact, the recollections were so vivid the character wouldn't leave me alone after I'd written the story. Other things that I might do with him came into my mind: other stories that I wanted to tell about this boy who was quite like me (but in fiction could have slightly better luck than his author).

"I also thought of the books I had read at that age, and I couldn't recall anything quite like what I had in mind. I couldn't recall anything that seemed particularly real or relevant to me. No doubt there are books that might have been, but they didn't come my way. So I wondered if I could write the sort of book that I would desperately have wanted to have read at that age, a book that gets inside the head of its central character, and ends up saying 'It's okay. You might feel very undesirable. You might have all these insecurities and improbable dreams. But you're okay. You're normal. You'll be fine. Look at this.'"

In After January, Earls wrote the kind of book he wished he could have found during his own late teen years. It is the story of seventeen-year-old Alex Delaney, who is poised on the brink of adulthood, still unsure of who he is and what he needs to do with his life. Having completed his secondary school education and waiting for notification of acceptance into law school, Alex spends the month of January in a kind of emotional flux. (The Australian school year ends in December, rather than in June as in the United States.) Smart but shy and timid, he has an introspective nature, and his tall, lanky appearance has always made him feel gawky around girls. During the month of January, as he kills time surfing at the beach or talking to neighbors, Alex has the sense that his life is about to change, and it does when he meets and falls in love with a young woman named Fortuna. The daughter of a bohemian potter, she is a worldly free spirit, in contrast to Alex's restrained, middle-class self.

Calling After January "a genuinely witty book," Pam Macintyre wrote in Australian Book Review that Earls's young adult novel "has many of those moments of insight when first love opens new ways of looking at the world." Gillian Swan, in Fiction Focus, maintained that in the novel, which is narrated in the first person by its teen protagonist, "Earls has captured the 'nowhere' feeling that exists when people have finished with one part of life but not yet started on the next; the waiting, the reflection, the looking forward, the not knowing." "In writing After January, I wanted to explore contemporary issues, but in a different context," the author explained. "There are no heavy messages, and humour and irony are of great importance. It is a story of the strong feelings and small happenings that, at seventeen, mean a great deal. It's a time of life that interests me, and that I plan to keep writing about."

Writing After January would influence Earls's later adult fiction. "I've realised that it's okay to use regular things," he once commented, "to build up my characters from small, straightforward, and often appealing parts. And I like it when people come up to me and say they related to something in one of my books, when they write to me and say they've felt that way too, and that it really meant something to them when they saw it in writing.

"I think some of my early writing might have been too preoccupied with trying to be interesting, without realizing how interesting regular people and their regular lives, with their idiosyncrasies and unexpected moments, could be.

"I also enjoy the writing more now, the unhurried processes of exploration as I work my way into my characters' heads and my story. As my characters not only develop, but in some way become people I know and who can lead me places, show me things in the story that I wasn't aware of. For me, those are some of the most exciting moments of writing.

"While 'write what you know' sounds like a cliché, I think I now know what it means. I don't feel compelled to write only what I know (I do, after all, have an imagination), but I think I've learned to value what I know, and I think I'm a better writer because of that. I also don't think it limits me. While After January and Zigzag Street are set in a Queensland coastal town and in a Brisbane suburb they are, ultimately, stories about people. I hope I've made the places real, but I hope I've made the people real, too. If I've done that, the stories can be read anywhere."

Perfect Skin is the story of Jon Marshall, a surgeon who lost his wife in childbirth. Now, as a single father raising a baby girl, he begins cautiously to date. His first encounters, with Katie, a friend of a friend, end in disaster; but then John meets Ashley, who is many years his junior. "Earl spends far too much time dissecting Jon's social life in the context of '80s rock music," according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly; however, "He earns kudos … for steering his would-be lovers away from a formulaic happy ending." John Green in Booklist wrote that "some of the gags go on much, much too long, but this Australian best-seller is funny and moving."

Several of Earls's books have been published in the United States, and several of his works have been adapted for film and stage plays, including Forty-eight Shades of Brown. Like many of Earls's other stories, Forty-eight Shades of Brown depicts young men searching for their identities as they deal with the end of high school and the onset of adulthood in Brisbane, Australia. Dan lives with two university students while his parents work in Geneva. In a freewheeling atmosphere, he tries to impress the beautiful Naomi with his knowledge about Australian birds and the four dozen shades of brown they come in.

Earl returned to his roots in The Thompson Gunner, a story about a woman who is haunted by her memories of terrorist attacks in Ireland by the Irish Republican Army. Having grown up Protestant in Northern Ireland, Earl and his family moved to Australia when he was eight and he still has vivid memories of the Troubles, as the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants was known. In The Thompson Gunner, he deals with these issues through a female character in similar circumstances.

Earls's other notable works include Zigzag Street, which has also been adapted for the stage, and Monica Bloom, in which an Australian boy falls in love with a girl who is visiting from Ireland.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Australian Book Review, February-March, 1996, Pam Macintyre, review of After January, p. 56; April, 1998, review of Bachelor Kisses, p. 40; June, 1999, review of Headgames, p. 33; September, 1999, review of Forty-eight Shades of Brown, p. 40.

Booklist, September 15, 2001, John Green, review of Perfect Skin, p. 191.

Fiction Focus, Volume 10, number 2, 1996, Gillian Swan, review of After January.

Journal of Australian Studies, March, 1999, Ingrid Woodrow, "Interview with Nick Earls," p. 144.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2005, review of After Summer, p. 472.

Magpies, September, 1999, review of Forty-Eight Shades of Brown, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly, October 8, 2001, review of Perfect Skin, p. 44; May 16, 2005, review of After Summer, p. 64.

Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), September 2, 2006, Susan Wyndham, "The Hot Seat: Nick Earls."

Viewpoint, autumn, 1996, review of After January, pp. 37-38; winter, 1996, Robyn Sheahan, review of After January, pp. 31-33.