ABSTRACT
'Repetition and pattern give our lives meaning', Alan Wall wrote in an online exchange with the novelist Michael Moorcock; 'novelty by itself is chaos. If we can't find shared patterns between what we call the past and the present, then there can be no history and nothing can be redeemed'. His career as a novelist has been dedicated to the mapping out of those shared patterns. Wall was born in Bradford in 1951 and read English at Oxford in the early 1970s. In the decades after graduating he had a number of jobs, from teacher to songwriter to despatch rider. It was only in his forties that Wall became a full-time writer but since the appearance of Bless the Thief in 1997 he has published four further novels and a collection of short stories. Wall has published collections of poetry and Jacob, a challengingly hybrid work, written in both verse and prose, which won the Hawthornden Prize.
