Born in Wales in 1947, Paul Griffiths has written music criticism for the Times, the New Yorker and the New York Times, four novels, several books on classical music, and multiple libretti and texts for other musical projects. In 2014, he was awarded an OBE for services to music.
Much of Griffiths’s fiction develops pre-existing stories: The Lay of Sir Tristram is an expansion of an ancient legend, let me tell you an offshoot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (with Ophelia at the centre). Mr Beethoven, his latest novel, which has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, takes a similar approach, and imagines an extra few years at the end of the composer’s life. The novel sees Beethoven travel to Boston to compose an oratorio in 1833 – in reality, six years after his death. Written in the style of a historical text, the novel interrogates the meaning of history and how we interpret the past.
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