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Zane Radcliffe was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1969, the year the Troubles started. The day he moved to London in 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. Typical.
He graduated from Queen’s University Belfast and was Editor of the Student Newspaper. After a brief stint as a music journalist writing for M8 and a year studying advertising in Watford (Come on the ‘orns!), he got his first ‘proper’ job as an advertising copywriter in London in 1995.
The next six years were spent writing commercials for Tango, Pot Noodle and John West (among others) … and introducing the British public to the delights of McDonald’s Indian burgers with an ad described by AA Gill as ‘very funny and cleverly made, but what a simply nauseating idea a curried McDonald’s is and how terminally, remedially tasteless and crass do you have to be to take the food of a culture that reveres cows as sacred and stick it in a bun.’
But the undoubted highlight of Zane’s advertising career was writing the world’s first topless radio ad, voiced by glamour model Jo Guest. Bizarrely the ad was banned when listeners complained about such flagrant nudity on the airwaves.
In the summer of 2001, Zane penned his first novel ‘London Irish’, a black comedy concerning a disillusioned Ulsterman living in London who is forced to flee the city and ends up in Edinburgh. Spookily, life then imitated art, and Zane moved to Edinburgh six months after the book’s publication.
London Irish went on to win the 2003 WHSmith ‘People’s Choice’ Award for New Talent. It was followed in September of that year by ‘Big Jessie’, a novel described by FHM as ‘ funny, absurd and memorable … the Peace Process written by The Fast Show.’
His third novel, The Killer’s Guide to Iceland, was inspired by his many visits to the ‘Land of Fire and Ice’ and is his most accomplished work to date. Zane will be appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival.
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