Profile of Garan Holcombe

Bio:

Garan Holcombe was born in Pontypridd, South Wales. After studying English at Nottingham University he spent several years abroad, living in many different countries including Canada, Poland, Bolivia, Venezuela and Spain. Along the way he worked as a housekeeper, bookshop assistant and film reviewer. But most of his time was spent in the classroom teaching quizzical students irregular verb forms. In 2007 he finally gave this life up and now lives in Cambridge, England, earning his living as a freelance writer. He is currently working on his first novel, "The Act of Union."

Email Address:

garanh (AT) gmail (DOT) com

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

So Many Ways To Begin by Jon McGregor
Posted on 16 Jul 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Great Britain

David and Eleanor’s story is an unremarkable one. But their ordinary disappointments and frustrations are precisely what make the novel memorable. McGregor generates great poignancy by naming each chapter after various fragments of the characters’ lives, a letter, a photograph, an old wooden boat. Like Roddy Doyle, McGregor takes uncelebrated lives and invests them with dignity and depth.
The Collector by John Fowles
Posted on 11 Apr 2007 in Classics, Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Thrillers

Fowles was a writer who always seemed content to remain in the shadows, on the edge of things. He would emerge now and again to play the part of the cantankerous recluse, but he was, in essence a private, even hermetic man.
Spanish Cinema: Almodóvar and Amenábar
Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Essays, Movies

With camp, hedonistic and sexually vulgar films, notable for their strong, flamboyant women and their comic, melodramatic treatment of everything from necrophilia to the need to keep your eye on the gazpacho, Almodóvar has risen to the top of the Spanish film industry. But now…
Reflections On the Work of Paul Auster
Posted on 25 Mar 2007 in Biography, Essays, Literary Themes, Writers

Paul Auster is a writer, who like Beckett is obsessed with identity and the way it is constructed out of and through the medium of stories, words, or even the thinnest of airs.
Life Without Max: The Genius of W.G. Sebald
Posted on 25 Mar 2007 in Biography, Essays, Literary Themes, Writers

Other writers such as Geoff Dyer and Alain de Botton have also established themselves as exponents of a similar type of hybrid writing style. Yet they are more obviously producing non-fiction and neither has written anything to rival Austerlitz, the best of Sebald’s work.
Stanley Kubrick: The Legacy of a Cinematic Legend
Posted on 25 Mar 2007 in Biography, Essays, Movies

Many continue to see the director’s films as cold and cynical, as being somehow stripped of heart and sentiment, as being products of a hard and rational intellect.
A Tribute to Hunter S. Thompson: A World to Fear and Loathe More
Posted on 16 Mar 2007 in Biography, Essays, Writers

Three books changed my life. George Orwell’s 1984, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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Profile of Garan Holcombe

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