James Scudamore’s comic, violent and poignant rags-to-riches tale is the story of a man whose appetites risk taking him to the brink of madness
James Scudamore
James Scudamore’s peripatetic upbringing provided him with the ‘exposure to other cultures at an impressionable age’ that has informed his four novels to date
A childhood variously spent in Japan, Brazil and Ecuador has given Scudamore an ‘outsider’s view of the UK, and possibly of life in general’. This ‘writer’s view’ is perhaps why he calls his fiction ‘inquiries’. His first-hand knowledge of Brazil, where he lived between the ages of eight and twelve, is tangible in the depiction of São Paulo in Heliopolis - where the ‘inquiry’ is into the contradictions of the Global South elite. Scudamore’s novel writing is underpinned by his work as a university creative writing teacher. He has also worked in various roles in the food business and has ‘plenty of strong opinions when it comes to food’.