Matthew Kneale (born 24 November 1960) is a British writer. He is best known for his 2000 novel English Passengers. Life Kneale was born on 24 November 1960 in London, the son of screenwriter Nigel Kneale, and the children's writer Judith Kerr. He is also the grandson of Alfred Kerr, a German theatre critic and essayist, who as a dissident and critic of the Nazi Party was forced to flee Germany with his family in 1933. Matthew first accompanied his mother on a visit to Germany in 1967. Kneale was brought up in Barnes, attended Latymer Upper School in West London, and then studied modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford. Growing up, he was fascinated by other cultures, past and present, and as a student he travelled in Europe, South America, Central America and the Indian subcontinent. After graduating he knew he wanted to write but had little idea how to set about such a thing. He traveled to Tokyo, where he found work teaching English and began writing a diary and short stories. Later, on returning to England, his experience in Japan inspired his first novel, Whore Banquets. During the next few years Kneale lived primarily in London, travelled, spent a year in Rome, and wrote his second novel, Inside Rose's Kingdom. In 1990 he moved to Oxford, where he wrote two historical novels, Sweet Thames and English Passengers. He also developed an interest in languages, attempting to learn Spanish, Romanian, Albanian and Amharic (Ethiopian). In 2000 he married Shannon Russell and they moved to Italy and Shannon's homeland of Canada. He and his wife now live in Rome with their two children. Work Kneale's first novel, Whore Banquets, tells the story of an Englishman whose affair with a Tokyo woman brings him into the realm of Japanese organized crime. It won the 1988 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1988 Betty Trask Award. It was later republished as Mr Foreigner. Inside Rose's Kingdom follows a young innocent who moves from the countryside to London, where he becomes caught up with a group of controlling, emotionally grasping people. Sweet Thames is set in London in 1849 and tells the story of the trials of an enlightened drainage engineer whose wife vanishes during a cholera epidemic. It won the 1993 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. English Passengers tells the story of a religious-scientific expedition that seeks to find the Garden of Eden