The Burrow - Gordon Houghton's biography page

Click on one of the links on the left to find out more about me, or read on for my background and interests.

I was born in 1965 in Blackburn, Lancashire. My dad was the sixth of eight children, my mum the first of seven, and I have one (older) brother, who is much funnier than me. If you'd like to see some very old pictures of my family, click here.

I went to primary and grammar school in Blackburn, then took a three-year course in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where I met my partner, Kati. After many years of infertility, we now have three children, Sam, Sophie, and Benjamin, all conceived through IVF.

After college, I joined (and later edited) Zzap!64, a games magazine dedicated to the Commodore 64; since then I have been involved in The Word Factory. This began as a freelance writing company, but now includes onscreen editing, help text generation, product testing, translation, project management, and DTP.

I've also written some novels. The Dinner Party was published by Transworld in 1998 (Le Dîner, a French translation, appeared in 2003); and in July 1999 it was followed by The Apprentice. A year later The Apprentice was published in the US by St Martin's Press, under the alternative title of Damned if You Do; it has since been translated into Russian and Italian. After taking a decade off to help raise my children, I returned to writing in 2011 with a dystopian SF novel called Max, and have now published all my back catalogue as ebooks.

These are a few of my favourite things:

Films: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, The Party, Alien, Burnt By The Sun, Festen, Amelie, Mon Oncle, Annie Hall, The Seventh Seal, Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Secrets and Lies, Crimes and Misdemeanours, To Live, Casablanca, Duck Soup, Singin' In The Rain, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Rollerball, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Sound of Music, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, J-Horror, The Lives of Others, REC, Memento, Dekalog, Come and See, Rope, Rear Window, Vertigo...
Anime: Death Note, Monster, Mushi-Shi, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and all of Studio Ghibli's output.
Computer games: The Sentinel, Dropzone, Spindizzy, Thrust (Commodore 64); Dungeon Master, Speedball, Kick Off 2 (Amiga); Oids, Super Sprint (Atari ST); Chuckie Egg (MSX); Scramble, Robotron, Defender (arcades); Warcraft I-III, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Planescape: Torment (PC); Zelda, Ice Climber (NES); Dragon Spirit, Gunhed, Galaga 90 (PC Engine); Thunderforce 2, Hellfire, Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (Megadrive); Tetris, Qix, Soko-Ban (Gameboy); Radiant Silvergun, Soukyugurentai, Battle Garegga, Parodius Da!, Bomberman (Saturn); Super Marioworld, Super MarioKart, A Link to the Past (SNES); Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Paper Mario (N64); Rez, Border Down, Under Defeat (Dreamcast); Metroid Prime, Zelda: Wind-Waker, Ikaruga, Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube); OutRun 2 (X-Box); Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou, Espgaluda, Gradius V, Katamari Damacy, Okami, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Dragon Quest VIII (PS2), Super Mario Galaxy, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Mario Kart, House of the Dead: Overkill, (Wii); Everybody's Golf on the PSP and loads of DS and iOS games.
Television: Bilko, ER, Frasier, Star Trek: TNG, Columbo, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Breaking Bad, live footy, not-live footy.
Music: How Soon Is Now? (The Smiths); Lounge Act, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana); No Surprises, Street Spirit, How To Disappear Completely, The Pyramid Song and the whole of In Rainbows :-) (Radiohead); Hold Tight (Fats Waller), A Day in The Life (The Beatles), Small Blue Thing (Suzanne Vega), The End (The Doors), Xanadu, Afterimage, Closer to the Heart (Rush), Breathe Me (Sia), and about a thousand others.
Art: Red Painting (1961), by Franz Kline. Anything by Franz Kline. I like Franz Kline.
Books: Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut); The Burrow, Metamorphosis (Kafka); Momo (Michael Ende); Passage, Doomsday Book (Connie Willis); Neil Gaiman's Sandman library; Alexander McCall Smith's von Igelfeld and No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels; Frederik Pohl, Philip K Dick and everything that Ursula Le Guin has ever written; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee); T. S. Eliot; and all the miserable Anglo-Saxon poets I read at college.