Nick Coleman
2012 Shortlist
Nick Coleman was born in Buckinghamshire in 1960 and now lives in London with his wife and two children. Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, he was Music Editor of Time Out magazine for seven years.
He was a senior editor and writer at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday between 1994 and 2006. He has also written for The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, US Vogue, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire - mostly about music, but also books, sport and travel. Nick was the co-editor in 1996 of the Picador Book of Sports writing and creator of The Music Group on BBC Radio 4.
At the age of 47, he was stricken by sensor neural hearing loss that left sound – and music – two-dimensional and eventually unbearably painful to experience. It was this loss of sound, silence and music that inspired the author to write this memoir, which feels as much like therapy for him as it does a story for the reader.
Wellcome Book Prize Achievement
The Train in the Night
By Nick Coleman