John Healy

John Healy is a writer of novels, plays and an award-winning autobiography, The Grass Arena. He was born in 1942, of an Irish family in North London. John Healy spent fifteen violent, destitute years living rough at a time when begging carried an automatic prison sentence. He became a chess Grand Master. In 1986 he wrote his 'savage masterpiece' The Grass Arena (now a Penguin Modern Classic), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize in 1989 for autobiography. Streets Above Us, his first novel, was published in 1990. THE METAL MOUNTAIN is John Healy's second novel, published 30 years after The Grass Arena.