Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959) is a British novelist and short story writer. In 1993, he was selected by the literary magazine Granta as one of the 20 best young British writers while his novel Under the Frog was featured on the Booker Prize shortlist. Early life Fischer's parents were Hungarian basketball players, who fled Hungary in 1956; first his father, György Fischer, and then his mother, the captain of the women's national basketball team. Tibor's father studied economics at Manchester University, started work in the Hungarian section of the BBC taking the name "George Fischer," and ended up as Radio Four's head of talks and documentaries. Tibor Fischer was born in Stockport, England and grew up in Bromley, Kent, where he attended the local comprehensive school. He studied Latin and French at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Author The 1956 revolution, and his father's background, informed Fischer's debut novel Under the Frog, about a Hungarian basketball team in the first years of Communism in Hungary. The title is derived from a Hungarian saying, that the worst possible place to be is "under a frog's arse down a coal mine." In 1992, the novel won a Betty Trask Prize for literature, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker prize. Fischer's subsequent novels include The Thought Gang, about a delinquent and alcoholic philosophy professor who hooks up with a failed one-armed bandit in France to form a successful team of bank robbers, and The Collector Collector, about a weekend in South London, narrated by a 5000-year-old Sumerian pot. Voyage to the End of the Room was published in 2003, and concerned an agoraphobic ex-dancer. Good to be God was published by Alma Books on 4 September 2008. In it a broke, unemployed, "habitual failure" uses his friend's credit card to start a new life in Florida where he decides that the fastest way to make a fortune would be to start a religion. Fischer, in 2000, published a short story collection entitled Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid, published in the U.S. as I Like Being Killed: Stories. Academia In 2009, Fischer became the Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at City and Guilds of London Art School. Politics In April 2017, Fischer wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian where he defended Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's government against charges of authoritarianism and antisemitism. In the same