6 of our favourite author cameos in films – did you spot them?

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Features

The Cider House Rules

The Cider House Rules is difficult to define and impossible not to admire

John Irving has been compared with Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling for words and mastery over his craft. This superbly original book is one to be read and remembered

Funnier than Garp...it's an irresistibly readable yarn spun by a master's voice

Like the rest of Irving's fiction, it is often disconcerting, but always exciting and provoking

John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times – winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award, in 1981, for the short story ‘Interior Space’. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules – a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For more information about the author, please visit www.john-irving.com

'Witty, tenderhearted, fervent’ New York Times 
‘Difficult to define, impossible not to admire’ Daily Telegraph 
‘An old-fashioned, big-hearted novel... somewhere between Trollope and Twain’ Boston Globe 
'Superb in scope and originality, a novel as good as one could hope to find from any author’ Joseph Heller 
__________ 
 
'The reason Homer Wells kept his name was that he came back to St Cloud's so many times, after so many failed foster homes, that the orphanage was forced to acknowledge Homer's intention to make St Cloud's his home.' 
 
Homer Wells' odyssey begins among the apple orchards of rural Maine. As the oldest unadopted child at St Cloud's orphanage, he strikes up a profound and unusual friendship with Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder - a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether. What he learns from Wilbur takes him from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage surgery, to an adult life running a cider-making factory and a strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend.

Avenue of Mysteries

In his latest novel, John Irving explores - in his inimitable way - the ways in which our pasts reverberate in our presents and, indeed, our futures.

From the first page to the last, there is a goodness to this novel, a tenacious belief in love and the redemptive power of human connection, unfettered by institutions and conventions. This belief, combined with good old-fashioned storytelling, is surely why Irving is so often described as Dickensian. But John Irving is his own thing, and so is his new novel. Avenue of Mysteries is thoroughly modern, accessibly brainy, hilariously eccentric and beautifully human.

Irving has packed so much detail in . . . And yet he has not run out of what has endeared him to so many for so long: immense charm, an appetite to hurtle headlong at the biggest questions and the altogether unfashionable belief that sentimentality is not a crime against art

Mischievous . . . Challenging and absorbing . . . Juan Diego emerges as one of Irving’s most memorable and fascinating creations, which is saying something. He is a twenty-first century Garp.

Irving has embarked on his dark phase, as did Dickens. It will be interesting, if melancholy, to follow him down that gloomy avenue

A typically idiosyncratic Irving novel: at times exhausting, at other times rambling and self-indulgent, but always readable, impassioned and thought-provoking

Grabs you by the throat in a way few other authors’ work can

Irving’s powers of storytelling – when to give knowledge and when to withhold it, then smack you in the face with it – remain intact

Juan Diego’s little sister is a mind reader. As a teenager, he struggles to keep anything secret – Lupe knows all the worst things that go through his mind. And sometimes she knows more. What a terrible burden it is to know – or to think you know – your future, or worse, the future of someone you love. What might a young girl be driven to do if she thought she had the power to change what lies ahead? 
 
Later in life, Juan Diego embarks on a journey to fulfil a promise he made in his youth. It is a long story and it has long awaited an ending, but Juan Diego is unable to write the final chapters. 
 
This is the story of what happens when the future collides with the past.

In One Person

Spanning fifty years, In One Person is an breathtaking examination of sexual identity

This wonderful novel is an epic, moving survey of 70 years of sexual revolution

Deeply enjoyable... a comic celebration of polymorphous perversity, and of literature

Irving has rarely written with the gorgeous poise and control he musters here

In One Person gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes. Tolerance, in a John Irving novel is not about anything goes; it’s what happens when we face our own desires honestly, whether we act on them or not

A brave and hugely affecting depiction of how in one life (sexual and otherwise) we contain multitudes

Boldly conceived and energetically executed

A rich and absorbing book, even beautiful

Told with Irving's typically Dickensian scope and humanity, In One Person is a celebration of difference

Irving writes with clarity and compassion about the Aids epidemic: his forensic detailing of this merciless disease is deeply affecting

Crammed with Irving's signature cleverness

This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic and funny - it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel.  A profound truth is arrived at in these pages.  It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious.  It is America and American writing, both at their very best

In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career Irving has always cherished our peculiarities - in a fierce, not a saccharine way. Now he has extended his sympathies - and ours - still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. John Irving in this magnificent novel - his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp - has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving's fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film.Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five foreign languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers.Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called "an American classic" is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)-the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States. 
 
In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.(He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven.)In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules-a Lasse Hallström film with seven Academy Award nominations.Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor-the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving's ninth novel, A Widow for One Year. In One Person is John Irving's thirteenth novel.

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love — tormented, funny, and affecting — and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a ‘sexual suspect’, a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 — in his landmark novel of ‘terminal cases’, The World According to Garp. 
 
His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers — a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself ‘worthwhile’.

The 158-Pound Marriage

A modern classic from the international bestseller John Irving.

The most important American humorist to appear in the last ten years

Irving's popularity is not hard to understand. His world really is the world according to everyone

John Irving has been compared with Kurt Vonnegut and J.D.Salinger, but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling for words and mastery over his craft. This superbly original book is one to be read and remembered

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.' 
 
In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'. 
 
The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. He is also the author of the international bestsellers A Widow for One Year, The Fourth Hand and Until I Find You. 
 
A collection of John Irving's shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business. 
 
Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

On a New England campus, Viennese housewife Utchka and her aspiring writer husband live a rather placid life with their two children.Until, that is, they meet Severin Winter, Professor of German and wrestling coach, and his delicate wife Edith at a faculty party. Utchka and Severin are rather taken with one another, and, conveniently, their spouses appear to be similarly smitten.A bizarre ménage a quatre is the result of these convoluted desires, and what starts out as a bit of fun is soon subject to the darker machinations of obsession,..

The Water-Method Man

A modern classic from one of the world's greatest living writers.

Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry

John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist. He is not afraid to take on great themes

John Irving has been compared with Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger, but is arguably more inventive than either

Three or four times as funny as most novels

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.' 
 
In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'. 
 
The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. John Irving is also the author of the international bestsellers A Widow for One Year, The Fourth Hand and Until I Find You. 
 
A collection of John Irving's shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business. 
 
Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

Fred 'Bogus' Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness. He also happens to have a complaint more serious than Portnoy's. Yet he stubbornly clings to the notion that he'll make something of his life, and is about to commit himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first. 
 
The Water-Method Man is a work of cosummate artistry and comic invention, bizarre imagery and sharp social and psychological observation.

The World According To Garp

A masterpiece from one of the great contemporary American writers.

Absolutely extraordinary...a roller-coaster ride that leaves one breathless, exhausted, elated and tearful

A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and heartbreaking. You know it is true. It is also terrific

Like all great works of art, Irving's novel seems always to have been there, a diamond sleeping in the dark, chipped out at last for our enrichment and delight...As approachable as it is brilliant, Garp pulses with vital energy

Like all extraordinary books, The World According to Garp defies synopsis

John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times - winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for the short story 'Interior Space'. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules - a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent novel is Last Night in Twisted River.

This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields - a feminist leader ahead of her times. It is also the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes - even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with 'lunacy and sorrow'; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. It provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."

My Movie Business

Irving has wrestled the movie business to the ground and won. No small achievement

A fascinating account by the author of his long and torturous path adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for film

John Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors. 
 
Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie, about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production. 
 
Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir - anecdotal, comic, affectionate and candid - My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.

Until I Find You

A tragic-comic classic from one of the world's greatest living writers.

John Irving has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger, but is arguably more inventive than either. Wry, laconic, he sketches his characters with an economy that springs from a feeling for words and a mastery of his craft

Irving writes with a lapidary directness that is unsurpassed by any living writer

It is very satisfying to read a book that is hard to put down, and if this were a more valued criterion, Irving would no doubt by now have received the official accolades he deserves

Irving's popularity is not too difficult to understand. His world really is the world according to everyone

Immensely moving and shot through with wit, humour and sadness, this book is addictive

A premier storyteller, master of the tragiocomic and among the first rank of contemporary novelists

Irving is peerless at presenting action, writing without a wasted second

'According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then.' 
 
Jack Burns' mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist in search of the boy's father, a virtuoso organist named William who has fled America to Europe. To fund her journey, she plies her trade in the seaports of the Baltic coast. But her four-year-old son's errant father can't be found, and soon even Jack's memories of that perplexing time are called into question. It is only when he becomes a Hollywood actor in later life that what he has experienced in the past comes into telling play in his present......

The Fourth Hand

A rich and deeply moving tale... Vintage Irving

Peerless... Writing without a wasted second

Articulate, clever, quirky, more than a touch profound and very funny

Sharp and very, very funny, this is another of Irving's fiercely original meditations of life's inherent strangeness

Irving has a literary style similar to a snowball effect: with each novel he creates symbols and develops themes to accompany those he has already accumulated. Grief, loss, abortion, amputation, sex, children, America's political history and the power of foresight are all explored here

Richly entertaining reading: part satire, part farce... there's no better - or funnier - reintroduction to the least known truly great American author

A coruscating comedy of sexual manners. In the margins of a hard-hitting satire on the modern media, Irving has produced some of the funniest bedroom scenes of recent years

If you are looking for something light and provocative for the beach this is a great little number

'Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.' 
 
While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy...

Last Night in Twisted River

A breathtaking story of a father and a son in 20th-century North America from the award-winning author of A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Last Night in Twisted River is a big, old-fashioned novel in the best sense; Irving has created in painstaking, loving detail a whole and complete world, a record of momentous social changes, but, above all a testament to the enduring power of love and fiction

Irving fans will relish this action-packed tale of father-and-son runaways

The most poetic and powerful of Irving's work to date

A page-turner in the smartest possible sense, written with the historical authenticity and taut command of language that has established Irving as one of America's greatest living novelists

John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning it in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules - a film with seven Academy Award nominations. Last Night in Twisted River is his twelfth novel.

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, pursued by the constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. 
 
In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as a world 'where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.' 
 
From the novel's taut opening sentence to its elegiac final chapter, what distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice, the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller.

Setting Free The Bears

The most nourishing, satisfying novel I have read in years. I admire the hell out of it

Imagine a mixture of Till Eulenspiegel and Ken Kesey and you've got the range of the merry pranksters who hot-rod through Mr Irving's book, tossing flowers, stealing salt-shakers, and planning the biggest caper of their young lives

'Truly remarkable. . . a complex and moving novel' Time 
'A wonderfully fresh, wildly imaginative notion of a book' Kirkus 
'Imagine a mixture of Till Eulenspiegel and Ken Kesey and you've got the range of the merry pranksters who hot rod through Mr. Irving's book' The New York Times 
_______ 
 
'The brown bears paced, brushing their thick coats against the bars; their heads swayed low to the ground, in rhythm with some ritual of stealth they were born knowing and pointlessly never forgot' 
 
It is 1967 and two Viennese university students decide to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. The eccentric duo, Graff and Siggy, embark on an adventure-filled motorbike tour of Austria as they prepare for 'the great zoo bust.' But their grand scheme will have both comic and gruesome consequences, as they are soon to find out... 
_______ 
 
What readers are saying: 
 
'Great' 
'Excellent' 
'Irving's mastery of the written English language is a delight' 
'One of the best writers in the world' 
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The Hotel New Hampshire

A hectic gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie

Irving is the wisest, most anguished and funniest novelist of his generation and The Hotel New Hampshire is his best work

'The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.' 
 
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they 'dream on' in this funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.

A Son Of The Circus

Daruwalla is another iconic Irving figure... Irving handles this incarnadine combination of farce and horror with high speed skill, creating a compulsively readable book

[Irving] is at the peak of his powers... he plunges the reader into one sensual or grotesque scene after another with cheerful vigour and a madcap tenderness for life... entertainment on a grand scale

More plot twists than the Ramayana and a cast of characters that includes dwarves, prostitutes, movie stars, tranvestites and at least one serial killer

Irving has given us that treat of treats, a wide-ranging fiction of massive design and length that encapsulates our world with intelligence and sugars the pill with wit

Daruwalla's quest for the truth is what sustains this book... a writer with the courage to follow this difficult journey while also exploring issues of poverty, racism and disease in a novel so full of humour is a writer to be treasured

John Irving is brilliantly clever: the fabulous, fantastic story never slows nor will you lose interest

'The doctor was fated to go back to Bombay; he would keep returning again and again - if not forever, at least for as long as there were dwarves in the circus.' 
 
Born a Parsi in Bombay, sent to university and medical school in Vienna, Dr Farrokh Daruwalla is a Canadian citizen - a 59-year-old orthopaedic surgeon, living in Toronto. Once, twenty years ago, Dr Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, two decades later, the doctor will be reacquainted with the murderer...

A Widow For One Year

Wickedly knowing, mischievously post-modern and magical realist along the lines of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies

A compelling chronicle of love and loss... His most intricate and fully imagined novel

Irving's storytelling has never been better

Irving's most entertaining and persuasive novel since The World According to Garp

'One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole awoke to the sound of lovemaking - it was coming from her parents' bedroom.' 
 
This is the story of Ruth Cole. It is told in three parts: on Long Island, in the summer of 1958, when she is only four; in 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career; and in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's also about to fall in love for the first time...

The Imaginary Girlfriend

His "inexpressible personal opinions" as a critic are wonderful, slaying many a sacred cow

The patent sincerity of his passion gives an appealing authenticity to this memoir... compelling and alive

Irving can transform sex and violence mythology with the best of 'em

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child. Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. 'It was so simple,' he remembers. 'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.' 
 
In 1963, Irving enrolled at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, and he later worked as a university lecturer. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, about a plot to release all the animals from the Vienna Zoo, was followed by The Water-Method Man, a comic tale of a man with a urinary complaint, and The 158-Pound Marriage, which exposes the complications of spouse-swapping. Irving achieved international recognition with The World According to Garp, which he hoped would 'cause a few smiles among the tough-minded and break a few softer hearts'. 
 
The Hotel New Hampshire is a startlingly original family saga, and The Cider House Rules is the story of Doctor Wilbur Larch - saint, obstetrician, founder of an orphanage, ether addict and abortionist - and of his favourite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. A Prayer for Owen Meany features the most unforgettable character Irving has yet created. A Son of the Circus is an extraordinary evocation of modern day India. He is the author of the international bestsellers A Widow for One Year, The Fourth Hand and Until I Find You. 
 
A collection of John Irving's shorter writing, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, was published in 1993. Irving has also written the screenplays for The Cider House Rules and A Son of the Circus, and wrote about his experiences in the world of movies in his memoir My Movie Business. 
 
Irving has had a life-long passion for wrestling, and he plays a wrestling referee in the film of The World According to Garp. In his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving writes about his life as a wrestler, a novelist and as a wrestling coach. He now writes full-time, has three children and lives in Vermont and Toronto.

From a novelist known for the complexity of his novels - they are also long - comes an autobiography of compelling simplicity; it is also short. Dedicated to the memory of two wrestling coaches and two writer friends, The Imaginary Girlfriend is a lucid portrait of the writers and wrestlers who played a mentor role in John Irving's development as a novelist, a wrestler and a wrestling coach. Moreover, this candid memoir portrays a father's dedication to his children: Irving coached his sons Colin and Brendan to New England championship titles - a championship that, as a competitor, he himself was denied. 
 
John Irving began writing and wrestling when he was fourteen. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, he was certified as a referee for twenty-four and he coached the sport until he was forty-seven. His thirty-three years in wrestling are three times those he spent as a student and a teacher of Creative Writing; yet his concise autobiography details the interrelationship of the disciplines of writing and wrestling - from the days when Irving was a beginner at both pursuits until his fourth wrestling-related surgery at the age of fifty-three. 
 
The Imaginary Girlfriend is both a work of the utmost literary accomplishment and a paradigm for living.

Trying To Save Piggy Sneed

This collection of short writing is a treat for John Irving addicts and the perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated.

Inventive incident, deft characterization and vivid language are all here

In a spirited opening piece, John Irving explains how he became a writer. There follow six scintillating stories written over the past twenty years, inlcuding The Pension Grillparzer, previously only to be found inside The World According to Garp, and now given its first independent airing.

John Irving

a ‘genius’ modern American classic

‘A work of genius’ Independent 
‘Brilliantly cinematic . . . Irving shows considerable skill as scene after scene mounts to its moving climax’ New York Times 
'A remarkable novel, a rare creation, an amazingly brave piece of work. So extraordinary, so original, and so enriching’ Stephen King 
‘Brave and subtly disturbing, it is all the more remarkable for its engagement with the deepest questions, the most painful mysteries of our lives’ Los Angeles Times 
________ 
 
'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.' 
 
Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is both extraordinary and terrifying.

John Irving

Books by John Irving

Articles featuring John Irving

6 of our favourite author cameos in films – did you spot them?

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