About

Between October 1996 and January 2014 Dan Rhodes wrote nine books:

It was a good run, but it seems to be over. [UPDATE. No it isn’t. He’s written a new book, called Sour Grapes, and it’s out now.]

In 2010 he won the E.M. Forster Award. Though initially dismayed that he would no longer be able to grumble about having been rejected by the literary establishment (a favourite pastime until this point), he quickly adjusted to his new status and went to New York to accept the award. At the ceremony he got to spend two hours examining the back of Meryl Streep’s head. He is able to confirm that she has very clean hair.

Here’s a list of some of the other honours he has received:

Anthropology was shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen award. At the ceremony, Rhodes had a dramatic tussle over a bottle of wine with someone he later found out was Harold Pinter.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home won the QPB New Voices Award in 2004. This was Rhodes’ first prize, and although he was mildly disappointed that he could no longer refer to himself as an award-losing author, he was, on balance, happy to have won. He celebrated by going on the water dodgems at Coney Island, fatally damaging his brand new watch in the process. He had thrown away the receipt.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home also won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award in 2004. Prior to the ceremony Rhodes had been living the writer’s life and hadn’t been home for a few weeks, so he hadn’t read the formal invitation. Consequently he turned up dressed in his idea of smart clothing (i.e. not at all smart) while all the other men were dressed in tuxes. [If he’d known it was a black tie event he wouldn’t have gone, as he really can’t be doing with that kind of nonsense.]

Timoleon Vieta Come Home was also shortlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize in Mauritius (Rhodes was forced to spend a few days at a luxury resort there), and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The book was included in Barnes and Noble’s Discover New Writers programme, for which Rhodes was presented with a magnificent Mont Blanc pen.  He swiftly lost the cap, thereby rendering it useless.

Gold won the 2008 Aye Write/Clare Maclean Prize for Scottish Fiction, officially making him a multi-award-winning author. It was also nominated for the IMPAC prize.

Rhodes was also included in the London Evening Standard’s 2003 list of People Who Make London Swing. This is particularly impressive as Rhodes has never lived in London. And nor is he, as stated in the piece, the “son of a Devon bricklayer”.

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[The above is taken from an article in issue 50 of Slightly Foxed Quarterly.]

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A recent Gallup poll revealed that there are an estimated 14,000 writers worldwide who share Rhodes’ name. He is not to be confused with the Daniel Rhodes who writes books about vampires, or the Daniel Rhodes who writes books about ceramics, or the Dan Rhode who also writes books about ceramics (and, coincidentally, is his neighbour) or the Dan Rhodes who writes books about theology, or the Danny Rhodes who writes teenage fiction, or the character Sheriff Dan Rhodes in Bill Crider’s Western detective series, or any of the countless other Dan/Daniel/Danny Rhodeses out there in Bookland.

He looks like this: 

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