Justin Cartwright

From Philosopedia

Justin Cartwright (1945 - )

• It's time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense.

Guardian (UK), 13 August 2005

Cartwright is a British novelist and, as quoted above, an outspoken freethinker.

He was born in in South Africa and educated in the US and at Oxford University. His novels include Look At It This Way, Interior, Masai Dreaming, and In Every Face I Meet, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and earned the Whitbread Novel Award in 1995 and a Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Leading the Cheers won the Whitbread Novel Award in 2002. He has won other awards including a Commonwealth Writer's prize and the South African Sunday Times Award.

His latest novel, The Song Before It Is Sung, was published in 2007. An early review, by Reed Business Information, describes the work: "The prose can be surprisingly hackneyed, while the characters rarely rise above caricature. It is difficult to discern whether the novel's sophistry, soap opera dialogue and lionizing of the ineffective German resistance are ironic."

Cartwright lives in north London with his wife and, occasionally, with his two sons.