Bill Broun was born in Los Angeles to an English machinist and an American nurse. He was educated at University College London and Miami University (Ohio).He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. He is Associate Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
Broun's first novel is Night of the Animals.
From the transcript of his interview with Scott Simon:
SIMON: London, 2052 - tell us about this world.Visit Bill Broun's website.
BROUN: Well, there is a newly empowered monarchy. And a lot of the important, you know, Victorian reforms that put that monarchy into check have been reversed, so that there's a fictionalized King Henry, who's a fictionalized version of the current Prince Harry turned into a tyrant. Britain has become ultra-nationalistc and powerful, too.
SIMON: And tell us about your main character, Cuthbert. He's 90, which means less than it used (laughter) to by 2052.
BROUN: Yeah. Cuthbert is someone who - I was inspired by Cuthbert because I lived in the 1990s in Houston, Texas. And for, you know, complicated reasons, I ended up making friends with a lot of men who were schizophrenic, who had sometimes been on the streets, sometimes were in kind of shaky housing situations.
And I'd my own sort of struggles with psychosis occasionally and anxiety disorder. Indeed, I turned to alcohol as a way of coping. And one of the things that I found with these men is that they were - they had all done the same thing. They were essentially self-medicating, you know, and when they weren't taking their medication, they would kind of go off the rails.
But I was fascinated by their...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Night of the Animals.
--Marshal Zeringue