PAUL WATKINS is thirty-one years old. In addition to being one of the best-reviewed new writers on the American literary scene, he is also one of the most colorful. The California-born son of Welsh parents, Watkins grew up on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, and was educated at Eton and Yale. His most recent book, Stand Before Your God, is a memoir about an American’s coming-of-age at a British boarding school. His widely praised first novel, Night Over Day Over Night, the story of a young SS soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, was published when its author was twenty-three, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. To research the book, Watkins hiked through the Ardennes forest, where the battle took place, and interviewed veterans of both sides. Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn, which was awarded Britain’s Encore Prize for best second novel, reflects several seasons Watkins spent working on trawlers off the New England coast. For his third novel, In the Blue Light of African Dreams, Watkins learned to fly a biplane and spent months in the Moroccan Sahara. And before he wrote The Promise of Light, he lived in the Irish towns of Lahinch and Ennistymon and drew upon a vast body of historical literature in order to study the Irish independence movement from all angles.
Watkins lived and worked in the woods of northern Maine while researching Archangel, his sixth book. He makes his home near Princeton, New Jersey.