Jon Courtenay Grimwood (born 1953 in Valletta, Malta) is a Maltese born British science fiction and fantasy author. He also writes literary fiction as Jonathan Grimwood, and crime fiction and thrillers as Jack Grimwood. Biography Grimwood was born in Valletta, Malta, grew up in Malta, Britain, Southeast Asia and Norway in the 1960s and 1970s. He studied at Kingston University, then worked in publishing and as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and The Independent. Now writing a memoir and studying for a PhD at the University of St Andrews, he lives in Edinburgh and is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, with a son, Jamie, from a previous marriage. Much of his early work within SF&F has been described as post-cyberpunk. He won a British Science Fiction Association award for Felaheen in 2003, was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Pashazade the year before, and won the 2006 BSFA award for Best Novel with End of the World Blues. He was short-listed for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2002 for Pashazade. His fourth book is loosely based on Stanley Weyman's Victorian novel Under the Red Robe. End of the World Blues was also short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The following were nominated in the SF novel category in the Locus Awards – Felaheen, The Third Arabesk (2004); Stamping Butterflies (2005); 9Tail Fox (2006); End of the World Blues (2007). The French translation of his 2013 literary novel The Last Banquet, written as Jonathan Grimwood, was shortlisted in January 2015 for , as , 2014, , translation by Carole Delporte. Grimwood's SF&F work tends to be of a quasi-alternate history genre. In the first four novels, set in the 22nd century, the point of divergence is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, where Grimwood posits a reality where Napoleon III's France defeats Otto von Bismarck's Prussia, causing the German Empire never to form and the Second French Empire never to collapse. In the Arabesk trilogy, the point of divergence is in 1915, with Woodrow Wilson brokering an earlier peace so that World War I barely expanded outside of the Balkans; the books are set in a liberal Islamic Ottoman North Africa in the 21st century, mainly centring on El Iskandriya (Alexandria). By contrast, there is little in Stamping Butterflies, 9tail Fox or End