Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. She has had five novels published: Lampshades, Penniless in Park Lane, Dead Glamorous, Spying on Strange Men and Fleshworld.
Morin's fiction is critically acclaimed and has been described as 'Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour' and 'A Scottish nihilistic Catcher in the Rye'.
Paul Golding in The Sunday Times compared her favourably to Françoise Sagan, writing 'Morin exploits the same obsessively introspective, whimsically punctuated stream-of-consciousness technique, but she is a much finer plotter and a hell of a better swearer'.
Jackie McGlone
of The Scotsman describes her 'wickedly entertaining pitch black novels' as being 'an ingenious blend of fact and fiction (full of epigrams and authorial apercus).’ She writes the 'Shallow Not Stupid' column in New York Arts and Fashion magazine Hint as Vivien Lash, the name of the main character in her fourth novel Spying on Strange Men.
Biography
Carole Morin was born in Glasgow. At 16 she became a 'Junior Diplomat' to the United States on an AFS Scholarship. She was Literary Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She was Associate Editor of Granta magazine and writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison. She has had weekly columns in both the right of centre The Spectator and left of centre New Statesman; according to The Scotsman she is the only novelist to achieve this. She has contributed to the Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Scotsman and The Herald. She has lived in Kampala and Beijing and now lives in London.
Latest novel: Fleshworld
Carole Morin's latest novel Fleshworld was described by The Times as 'science fiction as Frenzy-era Alfred Hitchcock might have conceived it... a funfair slide through Clockwork Orange's purgatorial milk bar into the seminal ... experimentations of Michael Moorcock and George Zebrowski'. The reviewer, Simon Ings goes on to conclude that 'Carole Morin understands what the young-uns have forgot: that politeness has no place in science fiction'.
Alistair Mabbot, writing in The Herald, was equally fulsome in his praise. 'From its very first page, Carole Morin's darkly disorientating dystopia puts its readers on edge, plunging them into a strange and seemingly unknowable future that only gets more discomforting the more she reveals of it.'.
Describing it as 'dark and transgressive' and 'shot through with disturbing sexual imagery', Mabbot goes on to say 'this provocative, skilfully-written novel is a compelling take on guilt, self-loathing, the acceptance of penance and the longing for redemption'.
The Scotsman, calling it 'a compelling and elegantly crafted novel' describes the world it is set in as 'a dystopian future London which has been split into two halves, one puritanical, the other hedonistic. The first of Morin's novel to have a male protagonist it is largely narrated by Rich Powers, a wealthy immunologist. When Power's perfect wife Ice goes missing, the ghosts of his troubled past become more intrusive and he develops an ambiguous relationship with Trash White, who The Times describes as 'an innocent(ish) schoolgirl'.
Although Powers is the main narrator, the triangle which emerges between him, Ice and Trash is given an extra dimension by sections narrated first by Ice and then by Trash. The apocalyptic climax of the novel unfolds in the shadow of the figure The Times calls 'the mysterious, shape-shifting Chairman Luck'.
A short film based on the book was produced by filmmaker and photographer Andrew Catlin.
Early career
Morin's first impact as a writer was as a prize winner of the Bridport short story competition in 1984. John Fowles described her entry Thin White Girls as 'an intriguing blend of sophistication and innocence'. She followed this by winning the Stand short story competition in 1987. Thin White Girls was subsequently published by Faber & Faber in their First Fictions collection along with her Stand-prize-winning short story "Hotel Summer" later republished in The Herald newspaper.