295- ] English Literature - Jasper Fforde

English Literature

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Forde is an English novelist known for his quirky and inventive novels, most famously the Thursday Next series, which began with The Eyre Affair in 2001. He also authored the Nursery Crime books, the Shades of Grey series, and the Young Adult Last Dragonslayer series.

Career: Before becoming a novelist, Fforde worked in the film industry for 19 years, contributing to movies like Goldeneye and The Mask of Zorro.

Notable works:

Thursday Next series: A popular series about a literary detective who can enter books.

Nursery Crime series: A detective series where classic nursery rhyme characters are investigated, such as in The Big Over Easy where Humpty Dumpty is the victim.

Shades of Grey series: A post-apocalyptic world where society is fragmented by the inability to see in color.

The Last Dragonslayer series: A Young Adult fantasy series about a young woman who manages a company of magicians.

Awards: He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing for The Well of Lost Plots, the second book in the Thursday Next series.

Welcome to the jasper Fforde website, and yes, Jasper Fforde is my real name. I am a British writer who lives in Wales and writes absurdist fiction.

You may notice that this website looks very little like modern websites, and that's because it was written a long time ago in HTML, which your great-grandfather can tell you was the language behind all websites back in 2000, the year when all this began - this website was about the thirty millionth ever registered. Wow. How small the internet was in those days.

The website has gone though many iterations, and has been added to so much over the years that there are now over 1300 pages to explore. Obviously, upgrading all that to a modern bells-and-whistles website would take forever and remove some of the Olde-eWorlde charm, so I have decided to simply leave it as it is, and carry on as I am. It's fine on desktops, most of it will work on tablets, although you may have to do a bit of jiggery-pokery on smartphones to read any articles.

Actually, while I'm talking about HTML, it does allow the relative novice like me to edit and add relatively easily, and if I have an idea for a silliness, the wonders of writing in source code HTML will allow you to do it. If you click on the 'Welcome' and 'This is me' banners above, you'll see what I mean.

So everything we have ever put on the site is still here. Navigation is at best eclectic, but usually logical, so long as you know how an index works and are willing to explore. You'll find lots of stuff, such as an introduction to the Seven Wonders of Swindon, my improved version of Monopoly, a little bit about How To Be A Hamlet, and a whole bunch of Special Features, complete with deleted scenes and 'making of' wordamentaries.

There are also easter eggs in abundance, with lots of unindexed pages to be found, like this error 404 message that pops up when you are looking for Romeo and Juliet. There is even an emergency boss coming facility just in case you get bored at work and don't want to get busted.

I add to the website sporadically as the mood takes me, and should be the first port of call if you want to find stuff out. Yes, agreed, Facebook is a better way to keep everyone totally clued in to what's going on, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I'm not a big facebooker, besides, this is kind of about ownership, too, and adding to stuff that is already here in order to create one huge 'Fforgasbord' of stuff.

Any alerts will be on Threads or Instagram, so if you want to know when there's an update, follow me on those. I also have a Mailchimp database, so if you would like to be s ent emails with news and views, sign up there.

So far, I have written books in four series: The Thursday Next series of which there are seven books, the Nursery Crime series (two), the Last Dragonslayer, series (four) and the Shades of Grey series (two so far out of three). You can have a look at a potted precis of the books. The next published book will be Red Side Story , the long awaited sequel to Shades of Grey. Ive also written two standalones: Early Riser, a thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated, and The Constant Rabbit, an allegorical story of racism and xenophobia in UK, also labelled as 'My Brexit Anger Book'. It's about anthropological rabbits living in the UK as a demonised other. It's kinda dark, but I do like it.

The Fforde Grand Central page is probably the best place to start to explore, but the index also covers most things. There is an FAQ page, too, and I also have an eBay page named Ffotographica where you can buy books and stuff.

Enjoy.

Jasper, Dec 2023.