Author John Niven celebrates 20 years writing with comic Scots parenthood novel

Daily Record

16-07-2025

Having already been a guitarist trying to reach the charts and then working for a major record label, John Niven has never been one to make a living from the everyday nine-to-five.
Having already been a guitarist trying to reach the charts and then working for a major record label, John Niven has never been one to make a living from the everyday nine-to-five.
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And when it came to writing his first book, he found himself struggling to balance his fear of failure with his fear of not trying.
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Twenty years on from having that go and producing his debut, Music From Big Pink, John is one of the UK's best-loved novelists and a successful screenwriter.
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His 12 books include Kill Your Friends – his big breakthrough title which he also adapted into a hit film starring Nicholas Hoult – as well as Scots golf comedy The Amateurs and his universally acclaimed memoir O Brother.
Now the Irvine-born writer and former Sunday Mail columnist is celebrating his 20 years between the pages with new release The Fathers, a darkly comic look at Scottish parenthood.
But the 57-year-old admitted the milestone has kind of crept up on him.
John explained: 'I'd always wanted to be a writer right through my 20s. but it just seemed like failure was guaranteed.
'Especially as I'd worked in the music industry and seen how many aspiring bands there are, and the odds are the same in writing, film and TV – there's a lot more applicants than there are jobs.
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'It seemed to me to be doomed but in the end it was the not trying that was making me more unhappy than failing would ever have made me, so I just had to give it a go.
'Twenty years – it took me by surprise.
'I still kind of think of myself as a sort of fairly new or young enfant terrible novelist, but then you look at the numbers and you're like, 'God, I'm like an old man in the twilight of my career.'
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'Twenty years years is the same distance from the mid-80s to when I started publishing novels, or from when I was born to the mid 80s.
'You look at the numbers back and it starts to shock you.'
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After leaving the music industry, John began writing scripts before turning to books with Music From Big Pink, a fictionalised story set around the legendary American rock group The Band.
At the end of 2004, he finally got the email that he was to become a published author.
John said: 'I was so broke after a couple of skint years when I got the news that it had been accepted. I was like a drowning man grabbing a life ring. I think that's why I ran quite hard for the first few years of my career, writing eight novels in the first 12 years.
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'I felt like I'd kicked the door open and there was no way I was going to let anyone shut it on me.'
He followed that well received debut with smash hit Kill Your Friends about murder in the record business.
It's an acerbic satire of the world he knew well but the reaction from within the music world perhaps wasn't what he expected.
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He said: 'The music industry is so ego-driven that people were angry if they weren't mentioned in the book and people who were in it were really pleased.
'But that's kind of why the book worked – it took lot of real-life executives and bands, and sprinkled them through the fictional ones to create this sort of stew where nobody quite knew what was real and what wasn't.
'I never expected that to be a hit – I thought it was too dark, too savage. I doubt very much that it would get published today.'
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John's work has been consistently well received over the past 20 years but it reached a new level of response two years ago for his heartbreaking memoir O Brother, which included the tragic story of his brother Gary's suicide.
He said: 'The release, the publication, the promotion of it was harder than actually writing the book.
'It was received very well, thankfully, and I think I felt relief more than anything else.' And he has stuck with the family theme for his latest title, The Fathers.
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It's about a successful television writer, Dan, and a lowlife criminal, Jada, who meet when their sons are born at around the same time and soon become increasingly connected.
Although the book is fictional, it's still a very personal tale for the father-of-four – he is dad to Robin, 29, Lila, 17, Alexander, seven, and Morty, four.
John said: 'I think the character of Jada was my brother blown up, and the character of Dan was me blown up in a hyper-real way.
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'But, to be honest, from where I came from, given my time and place, my school, I could have gone either way. I could have been Jada easy enough myself. But one of the fun things to do in fiction is to play with these things.'
John is delighted to get his new book out into the world this week, and the chance to share it with readers on a live tour across the UK, including two dates in Scotland.
He said: 'I think Kingsley Amis said that if someone has written more than a dozen novels, you have a pretty good idea of who they were.
'As you get older and look at that stack of books – 11 novels and a memoir – and hopefully, touch wood, God willing, more to come, if you leave a shelf of books behind you, for better or worse, it's a fair testament to who you were.'
He added: 'Somehow or another, I've got to my late 50s and I've never had a real job. It's been quite the ride.'