Sassy Jenks
Next Big Thing
She’s hipper than a pelvic replacements factory and so hot she’s smoking (40 Sweet Afton a day). Sassy’s first novel, Fester, earned the sort of wild acclaim normally reserved for Robbie Williams: “cool, urban and funky” (Guardian), “funky, cool and urban” (Independent) and “urban, funky and cool” (Times). The novel, about a serial killer obsessed with amputees, also gathered every literary prize going – including the prestigious Tipp-Ex Editor of the Year award and the Ratner Marketing Campaign prize – and there are whispers now about the Nobel. Yet Sassy, a working-class child prodigy – “I was part of an education authority programme for gifted kids, so instead of shoplifting with my mates on Saturday, I used to have to go to theatre workshops with bloody Ted Hughes” – remains refreshingly level-headed, even contemptuous about her fame, and couldn’t care less that her next novel, Scrapyard, whose action takes place in a stationary, rusting car (a metaphor for Blair’s Britain), has already got the literary world abuzz.
Inigo Thongsbridge
Conscience of the Left
Inigo Thongsbridge was the original angry young novelist, but these days he’s absolutely furious. I’m With the Brand, his latest satirical attack on the rise of the global corporation and the culture of commercialism was, he claims, buried by his publisher’s failure to take out any advertising. Inigo, thus cheated of a dead-cert bestseller and subjected to the additional indignity of watching Naomi Klein clean up, has had to make up the financial deficit by teaching a course on “Why New Labour Are Bastards” at the New University of Neasden (NUN). He now feels like an utter NUN-entity. Some of his students are so stupid that they don’t even know what month it is, but this doesn’t stop his wife getting grumpy about some of the girls on the course – she refers to them snidely as Apparat-Chicks – who ring up from time to time, to be reminded where Neasden is. It’s getting so bad that he’s thinking of moving back to his birthplace in Cumberland and writing a rite-of-passage novel about leaving home with socialist ideals and ending up crushed and disillusioned. It is, after all, what happened last week when, en route to NUN, someone banged into the back of his car and he couldn’t get Das Kapital out of the boot.
Mike Bloke
The Lad Novelist
Mike may have risen to fame in a burps-and-farts sitcom, but let no one forget that he has an Oxford degree. It was to show everyone he could string a sentence together that he wrote his novel Spot Squeezing in the first place – the title refers to Nietzsche’s comparison of the frustrations of contemporary living to a pimple that needed popping. This important subtlety having been ignored by his publishers, the result was not the intended volume of postmodernist irony, but, instead, fully fledged “lad lit”, complete with regulation zinging lime-coloured cover superimposed with cut-outs of a razor, a lighter and a condom. Fed up with laddish events in bookshops alongside pen-wielding former members of the Kray gang, Mike has decided to hop on the humorous travel-writing bandwagon. With a Ferret Down My Trousers, an account of walking from John O’Groats to Land’s End in the company of a live mammal, will be out in the spring and hopefully stop people at readings asking him how he lost his virginity (he hasn’t, as yet).
Euphemia Ogden
Northern Saga Writer
No one does clogs and shawls quite like Euphemia. She’s the queen of northern sagas; her three latest novels – Pease Pudding Polly, Coal Pit Kate and Slag Heap Sally all hit No 1. Not that success has gone to Euphemia’s head; she never loses sight of her roots and has them touched up by Jo Hansford at least once a fortnight. Nor does she forget her Newcastle childhood: Wor Mam – the forthcoming autobiographical account of how Euphemia, the daughter of a one-legged fish-and-chop shop labourer (the eponymous mater), escaped misery and poverty by winning a scholarship to Cambridge and becoming a successful writer about misery and poverty – is set to be another bestseller. Euphemia fully intends Wor Mam (which features a fetchingly hand-tinted picture of her actual mother looking balefully out of the door of the shared outside lavatory) to pay for the pool she’s planning in the grounds of her third home, the south of France villa she’s finally bought now that passports for pets means her beloved Westies, Fulham and Putney can – at last – travel BA First Class as well.
Jenny Bristols
Chick Literateuse
Jenny’s secretly sick of writing “flat-sharing in London looking for Mr Right” novels. Her inspiration’s gone, for one thing; she’s made so much money that, these days, she’s got a house all to herself and she’s got more Mr Rights than she can shake a Jo Malone incense stick at. There’s Mr Foreign Rights, for a start, then Mr Film Rights and even Mr T-Shirt and Other Merchandise Rights, all beavering away on her behalf at the literary agency. Jenny thinks, in any case, that she should be taken more seriously – her last novel, Airhead, was No 1 for weeks, and not one of the broadsheets reviewed it, let alone the damn TLS. It did get a mention in Peterborough, though, but that was a piece about the party, “The Naked Launch”, for which the invitations were pink thongs (Jenny’s own idea) printed with the venue details (a pole-dancing club in Soho). For her next book, however, Jenny’s definitely changing direction, and has, after endless nights burning the midnight Annick Goutal candles, hit on the perfect way of tapping into the new post-11 September sensibility and combining a few other bestselling ideas without alienating her heartland readership. A witty comic romance about being the abused daughter of a TV cook mother and SAS father would be perfect.
Ivo Forks
The Poet
One day poetry’s the new rock’n’roll, the next it’s the new raffia work. Ivo was hot when his publishers signed him, but he’s freezing now, especially as he’s fallen out with his celebrity girlfriend, who wasn’t in the contract but should have been. She was, after all, the only reason anyone gave a toss. “I don’t think my publishers can hear it,” moans Ivo of his new volume, A Humorous Look At Pain. “I don’t think they can even hear the people who like my work.” Reports of the death of poetry, he claims, are greatly exaggerated. “What’s so odd about someone in their mid-thirties writing a poem, anyway? Keats did loads of them.” It’s all the more difficult to bear because Ivo’s striking-format verse style has earned him plaudits in the past – “Immense promise and unforgettable delivery,” said the Literary Review. Staff at his local Waterstone’s certainly thought it was an unforgettable delivery, when 1,000 copies arrived from the publisher’s and have barely shifted since.
The further adventures of Sassy, Inigo, Euphemia and co can be followed in Fame Fatale by Wendy Holden, published by Headline on 14 January 2002
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