British · b. 1962
John Lanchester is a British novelist and journalist known for fiction and non-fiction that anatomize money, capitalism, and contemporary life — from the panoramic London novel Capital to his lucid account of the financial crisis, Whoops!
John Lanchester made his debut with the dark, brilliant comic novel The Debt to Pleasure (1996) and has since built a career spanning literary fiction and incisive non-fiction. He is one of the most financially literate of contemporary novelists, a regular contributor to the London Review of Books whose journalism on money and markets informs much of his fiction.
His 2012 novel Capital is his most ambitious work of fiction — a sweeping, Dickensian social novel that uses a single gentrifying London street to portray a whole city at the height of the financial crisis. Alongside his novels, Lanchester has written acclaimed non-fiction, including Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, one of the clearest popular explanations of the 2008 crash, and the dystopian novel The Wall.
Lanchester writes with clarity, wit, and a rare understanding of how economic forces shape ordinary lives, making him one of the essential chroniclers of money and modern Britain.
by John Lanchester
John Lanchester's sweeping social novel of London at the height of the financial crisis. On a single gentrifying street, Pepys Road, a banker, a Senegalese footballer, a Pakistani shopkeeper, a dying widow and others receive anonymous postcards reading 'We Want What You Have.'
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