Justin Cartwright

It is with great sadness that we mark the death of Justin Cartwright. 

The acclaimed author, who passed away peacefully on Monday 3 December, wrote more than a dozen novels in a career spanning four decades of success, and will be remembered as one of the finest novelists of his age.  That success included a shortlisting for the Booker Prize with IN EVERY FACE I MEET, and several times for the Whitbread (now the Costa) Novel Award.  He was to take the Whitbread with LEADING THE CHEERS in 1999, as well as winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the South African Sunday Times Literary Award, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for his bestselling THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS, which was an original Richard & Judy Book Club selection.  In recent years he was also a judge of the Costa Novel Award, and the International Man Booker Prize, both of which gave him huge satisfaction and enjoyment.

A sublime chronicler of the way we live now, Justin will be remembered for his razor-sharp observation of modern human behaviour and its obsessions and concerns, his complex and often compromised characters, a probing questioning of morality and responsibility at the heart of all of his novels, and an electrically wry humour never far from the surface of his writing.  Justin was described in the Guardian as “one of the finest novelists currently at work”, and by the Los Angeles Times as “a senior member of a masterful generation of English novelists that includes Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro” and he leaves behind a body of work that is an unalloyed tribute to him.  But his greatest pride and joy were his wife and two sons and his grandchildren, to whom we send our sincere condolences.

Remembering his early career in the Guardian in 2010 Justin wrote:

“I was now a professional writer, a novelist. I was convinced then, and I am now, that writing can change the world we live in, if only by tiny increments. I don't mean change in the politicians' jargon, but change that comes from enabling the reader to see another, imagined world, and to read things expressed in a way that affects them forever, so that they will always associate a place, or a lover, or an emotion with a phrase they have read. My world was formed by books. It's important to read with the eyes of a child, making the world new, rather than confirming what you already know.”

These are simple words, expressing with stunning clarity deeper truths – the skill that is at the heart of how we will remember Justin.  A cherished client of United Agents since its very first day of business, he was a warm and generous man, a brilliant novelist, and a dear friend.

James Gill, 4 December 2018

Justin Cartwright, 1945-2018

Photo credit: Jaime Turner