Hugh Fleetwood

Born in the UK in 1944, Hugh Fleetwood lived in England till the age of 18, when he went to Paris. Soon after his 21st birthday, he moved to Rome, where he spent the next fourteen years. In 1970 he had an exhibition of his paintings at the Two Worlds Festival in Spoleto, and published a number of poems in The Transatlantic Review; the following year his first novel, A Painter of Flowers, was accepted for publication in the UK, the US and Italy. His second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and was translated into a number of languages, including French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Finnish. Film rights were sold, but no movie was made; his third book, however, The Order of Death, did make it onto the screen. Starring Harvey Keitel, John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) and Sylvia Sidney, known as Corrupt in the US and Copkiller in Italy, the film received mixed reviews when it came out, but has since come to be considered a cult classic.

In the following years Fleetwood published a number of other books, and was called, amongst other things, "the master of modern horror." At the same time, he had further exhibitions of his paintings, and following his return to the UK, spent more time at his easel than at his typewriter or computer. But he continued to publish the occasional novel and short story, until recently, when he not only republished on Amazon/Kindle revised versions of two of his earlier titles, The Godmother and A Young Fair God, but published for the first time seven new books: The Company of Finches, The Portrait Painter, The Vampire of Tlallpa, Freedom, and a trilogy of novels set mostly in Scotland: The Angel of Death, A Great Shot, and Complicity. He had been working on all of these for some years, but being unable to go to his studio and paint, due to the Covid pandemic, he took advantage of being forced to stay home finally to finish them.

He is now working on a revised edition of his collected poems, Sketches and Reflections, that were first published by the Zeus Press in Russia in 2019.