| Tom Cox | |
| Nationality: | British |
| Genre: | Nature, Humour, Fiction, Folklore, Music, Golf |
| Subjects: | --> |
| Notablework: | --> |
| Spouses: | --> |
| Partners: | --> |
| Awards: | Shirley Jackson Award 2018 |
| Years Active: | 1999 - present |
Tom Cox is a Nottinghamshire-born British author who, as of 2021, has published twelve books. Recurring themes in his writing include folklore, rambling, wildlife, psychedelic rock, cat ownership, local history, and golf.[1]
Cox began publishing a music fanzine as a teenager in the early 1990s, interviewing Ray Manzarek among others on his parents' home telephone. Between 1999 and 2000 he was the chief rock critic for The Guardian and wrote columns and features for other newspapers and magazines, before leaving print journalism in 2015 to write regular pieces about the countryside, folklore and many other subjects for his voluntary subscription website.[2] [3] During the 2000s and early 2010s he published a number of books about golfing, including Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia, his account of his year as Britain's most inept golf professional, which was long listed for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year award. Cox has also published several books about his cats, including The Sunday Times bestseller The Good, the Bad & the Furry, and until 2016 ran the Twitter account 'My Sad Cat', which featured pictures of his cat The Bear.
His book 21st Century Yokel, published in October 2017, is described as "a nature book, but not quite like any you will have read before" and was crowdfunded in seven hours by Unbound. The book details Cox's time living in Devon and Norfolk, as well as stories about his grandparents in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.[4] [5] [6] The Guardian described it as "a rich, strange, oddly glorious brew" with elements of nature writing and memoir.[7]
Cox's fiction debut Help the Witch, a collection of ghost stories, was also crowdfunded via Unbound[8] and published in August 2018.[9] Cox moved to a remote house near Eyam in Derbyshire to work on the book, and was unable to leave the house by car for several months during the so-called Beast from the East.[10] This experience formed the basis of the title story, as well as Nearly Northern, a chapter in his next non-fiction book Ring the Hill (2019). The latter book is a successor to 21st Century Yokel and similarly features discursive anecdotes about rural life and rambling in Devon and Somerset.
Cox announced he was working on a full-length novel, Villager, in August 2020.[11] The novel was successfully crowdfunded by Unbound and was published in 2022.[12]