The Writers of Wales Database

WILLIAMS, JOHN

John Williams was born, lives and works in his hometown of Cardiff. He writes novels, short stories and screenplays set in a Cardiff that is changing fast. Williams celebrates the lives lived beneath the radar, the hustlers and grifters, hookers and guitar players, drug dealers and shoplifters, looking to make a crust or catch a break, looking for love. They are crime novels turned inside out. The police tried (unsuccessfully) to ban his Bloody Valentine (Harper Collins, 1994).

John has also published a number of non-fiction titles including his biographies of Black Power leader Michael X and Shirley Bassey. He currently writes for the Mail on Sunday and the Independent and is co-organiser of the Laugharne Festival. John has also worked for the NME and The Sunday Times, and has been a contributing editor of GQ magazine.

Reviews:
With respect to Michael X: A Life in Black and White (Century, 2008)

"…Absorbing, politically and socially astute…"
Marcel Berlins, The Guardian

"…an absorbing book that adds up to rather more than one life ... There are excellent descriptions here of street demos and wild parties that have the authentic note of the times … [John Williams] is diligent and often relishes his interviews with surviving relatives, friends and radicals…"
Times 
 
"...fascinating..."
The Spectator 
 
"...The life of Black Power leader Michael X is worth recalling even without its grisly ending…this biography tells a story that covers the great changes in London between the mid-Fifties and early Seventies..."
Nicholas Blincoe, Telegraph 

"...Williams doesn’t seek to redeem X, but to understand him in his full, devious complexity..."
Time Out

"...[An] engrossing biography. Michael X does a remarkable job of contextualising for a younger generation that may scarcely have heard of him the long-gone world of someone who once laid claim to being “the most famous black man in Britain”… a less skilful biographer might have settled for painting Michael x as a colourful trickster and imposter who got his just deserts. The reality, as Williams shows, is much more complex …That this is also a story told with compassion makes it all the more readable..."
The Independent


Selected Publications:

Non–fiction:
Into the Badlands (Paladin, 1991)
Bloody Valentine (HarperCollins, 1994)
Michael X: A Life in Black and White (Century, 2008)
Miss Shirley Bassey (Quercus, 2010)

Fiction:
Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (Bloomsbury, 1999)
Cardiff Dead (Bloomsbury, 2000)
The Prince of Wales (Bloomsbury 2003)
Temperance Town (Bloomsbury, 2004)
The Cardiff Trilogy (Bloomsbury, 2006)




Michael X: A Life in Black and White (Century, 2008)

The Michael X story is a tragicomedy of the sixties. It’s the extraordinary, all but forgotten story of a hustler from Trinidad who conquered swinging London. Michael X was the man who knew everyone – from Muhammad Ali to Alexander Trocchi, Malcolm X to John Lennon, William Burroughs to Leonard Cohen. He was an extraordinary figure who became the public face of black Britain in the late ’60s, before the media tired of him and he fell victim to the hustler’s classic mistake - believing his own hype. He moved back to Trinidad, started a commune and dreamed of becoming his country’s President. Instead two dead bodies were found on his land and he was convicted of murder and hanged three years later, despite the best efforts of his celebrity supporters.

This biography expertly places Michael X in context. It evokes the many worlds he inhabited, both physical worlds - Trinidad in the ’40s, Tiger Bay in the ’50s, Notting Hill in the ’60s - and cultural ones - emigrants, beatniks, revolutionaries.

The Michael X that emerges is not simply the black bogeyman familiar from the British press of the ’60s, but a complex individual, full of contradictions: brash and insecure, funny and menacing, black and white, a trickster and as serious as your life.

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