I started working as a mentor early in 2008 (meet my ten print published authors on the AUTHORS page), but I’ve been writing fiction since I was old enough to pick up a pen without putting it in my mouth.
I’ve had eleven novels published as Daren King: four adult literary novels and five children’s novels. I now write superhero time travel sci-fi as James Anders Banks, and am working on a crime thriller series as Jack Law.
My children’s novel Mouse Noses on Toast, published by Faber & Faber under the name Daren King, won the age 6-8 gold medal in the award then known as the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize. My fiction has been published in print in countries including the UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, Australia, China, Canada and the United States.
“The novel spins off on a multi-sided suburban orbit, an obscene, crazed and feveredly funny satire of the stunted televisual synapse. It is energetic and insane. Its heights of surreality are dazzling. There is a ‘tremendous television-shaped sadness’ all through it. It bangs itself off all four walls, so to speak, to be funny, and its hilarity is a kind of keening. It is a very scary ghost story indeed.”
Ali Smith, The Guardian
“[The author’s debut novel] was published in 1999 to gasps of astonishment. Critics described it as ‘exceptional’, ‘maverick’, ‘scorchingly poetic’, ‘my very favourite work of fiction this year’ and ‘like some delirious encounter between PG Wodehouse and William S Burroughs’.”
Katy Guest, The Independent
“This is an extraordinary debut.”
Christina Patterson, The Observer
“[The author] continues to demonstrate the originality that characterised his previous three novels. The idiom he employs is technically high-end. He does an awful lot with not very much. I tried hard not to like this book. But... it was never going to happen. I loved this book.”
Charles Hill, New Statesman
“[The author’s debut novel] is a total success: finely paced, wildly funny, deeply touching. I relished the lovely Joyce-meets-Estuary coinages. Subtler, and harder, is the inch-perfect comic timing that makes many scenes sound like some delirious encounter between PG Wodehouse and William S Burroughs.”
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
“It’s extremely hard to analyse or describe the magic of this extraordinary work.”
Christina Patterson, The Independent
“[The author] is an excellent writer. His language moves with great suppleness and easy eloquence.”
The Telegraph
“[The author]’s beautifully inflected, knowingly naïve novel is a superbly original work.”
Scotland on Sunday
“[The author’s second novel is a] comic masterpiece about a ghost giraffe with a filthy mouth, a book about innocence and experience, love, loss and bedroom furniture.”
Katy Guest, The Independent
“He’s a writer with a completely unique voice, and [the author’s third novel] is another polished gem of comedy and pathos.”
Laurence Phelan, The Independent
The menu at the top of the page will take you to the home page, and to pages where you can read about my successful authors, and the services I offer. Or you can jump straight to the contact page to send me an email.
The menu at the the bottom (three horizontal lines) will take you to the home page, and to pages where you can read about my successful authors, and the services I offer. Or you can jump straight to the contact page to send me an email.
James Anders Banks