David Peace's latest book, Red or Dead , may have "divided the critics", as he puts it, but the support of late Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly's family and the people of Merseyside mean more to him than a provocative review. Named by Granta in 2003 as one of the best young British novelists, 46-year-old Peace shot to prominence with the Red Riding Quartet , which was followed by The Damned Utd and three thrillers set in post-war Japan that began with Tokyo Year Zero , published in 2007. Peace, who is now working on the final book in the trilogy, was raised in Ossett, West Yorkshire, and now lives with his wife and two children in Tokyo, where he spoke with .
When I was eight years old. My dad was a teacher, but he had this ambition to be a writer and used to come home every night and go up to the spare bedroom. Also, when I was growing up, Stan Barstow, who wrote A Kind of Loving, was living in Ossett, so this was a small town and there was this famous writer living just a couple of streets away from us.
I was in a band, which fell apart, and went to Manchester Polytechnic. The main thing I had liked about being in a band was writing the lyrics, so I spent two years on the dole writing and in 1992 I sent the book to every publisher in the UK. It was rejected by every one of them. That was the lowest I've ever felt in terms of my writing. I went to Istanbul in 1992 for two years and that was the only time that I never wrote. When I came to Japan in 1994, I used to go to used bookshops but eventually ran out of books, so I decided to write the book I wanted to read. It's heavily influenced by American crime novels, but set in the environment that I grew up in, Yorkshire. I used to put in five hours before I went off to teach and then I'd come back in the evening and go through it again. My dad came out in 1995 and read what was to become 1974 and said I should send it to some publishers. Eventually, I got a fax back from Serpent's Tail and they offered me a contract for two books, but it was only for £1,500 (HK$18,500) for both. That was a bit of a shock. Through an agent we were able to talk them up to double that, and because that first book did reasonably well, they paid £15,000 for the next two. I later moved to Faber and eventually it was foreign book sales that allowed me to give up teaching - but that was not until nine years after the first book.
It's always the same. I'm awake at 5am and never need an alarm clock. I take the train with my daughter to school and then I go to a tiny office and work from 8am to 5pm. I tend to answer e-mail from Japan first then I'll write or research for four or five hours, have lunch and then reply to the UK e-mail after that.