David Profumo
- Prizes judged
David Profumo is a novelist and angler who combined his two obsessions in a collaboration with the future prize winner Graham Swift in an anthology of fishing stories, The Magic Wheel.
As well as his two novels, Profumo has been a long-time newspaper and magazine columnist, schoolteacher (at Eton and Shrewsbury), university lecturer and memoirist (he is, as he is no doubt sick of reading, the son of John Profumo). As a fisherman, he caught his first fish aged five and has, he says, ‘been trying to master the art ever since’. The activity is, he believes, ‘a paradigm of the individual struggle’ and so he finds references to fishing everywhere in life and literature.