DBC Pierre

DBC Pierre was raised in Mexico between the ages of seven and twenty-three, although he has also travelled extensively. He lived a very privileged life in the milieu of that 2% of Mexico that holds the country's wealth, and spent much time in the USA. Despite a very unrealistic, or 'fairy-tale' childhood, he found himself more in tune as a child with the other 98% of Mexicans, and increasingly escaped home to run with the street crowd. When, at sixteen, his father fell gravely ill, he was largely entrusted with the family home, its cars and staff, and without recourse to counsel or reason, in his grief embarked upon a life of blithe self-destruction, alongside another half-dozen junior rakes. Only two of them survived their twenties, and then only just.

"Mexico, with its contrasts, its crushing poverty and sparkling wealth, its institutionalised corruption and cultural wisdom, its love of life and its embracing of death, undoubtedly set me on a path toward the deep end, philosophically and emotionally speaking. A fast and careless life had put me in tune with the common man, for whom a throw of the dice would mean life or death. When, as a teenager, I set out for Texas to bring cars over the border, I saw that the same divides applied to the richest country on earth. Truest kinship was found in a group of homeless derelicts who camped under a bridge beside where I used to stay. It is in their broken-down lives that the seeds for Vernon were planted."

DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist, and currently lives in Ireland. Vernon God Little, his first novel, was awarded the 2003 Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award.