Sean Thomas (2012)

Sean Thomas is a British journalist and author. Born in Devon, England, and educated at University College London, he has written for publications including The Times, The Daily Mail, The Spectator and The Guardian, mainly on travel, politics and art.^[1][2] He has written, as a journalist, of his troubled early life, and multiple step-mothers.^[3] His father was the writer and translator D. M. Thomas, who died in 2023.^[4]

As a novelist he has used multiple pseudonyms. As Tom Knox, he specialises in archaeological and religious thrillers. He has also published erotic fiction under the pseudonym A J Molloy. More recently he has written novels under the pen name S K Tremayne.

Writing career

His first Tom Knox thriller, The Genesis Secret, focuses on the Neolithic archaeological site known as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which Thomas visited as a journalist in 2006.^[5] The book speculates on the genetic and sociological origins of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, with particular attention to the trait of sacrifice. Noteworthy for several exceptionally gruesome episodes, it was an international bestseller,^[6][7][8] and has so far been translated into 21 languages.^[9] The novel provoked controversy when the German Archaeology Institute complained that both a newspaper article and the book were based on "a falsified version of an interview with [chief archaeologist] Klaus Schmidt", which they argued constituted "a distortion of the scientific work of the German Archaeological Institute".^[10] Thomas has since returned to the Göbekli Tepe site, and its new associated sites, the Taş Tepeler.^[11]

His second Tom Knox thriller, The Marks of Cain was published in 2010. Centring on the Cagot community who lived in the Basque Country, and the troubled history of the German empire in Namibia, it too was an international bestseller. In Germany, the ebook version, published under the title Cagot, was notable for its experimental use of interactivity and alternate reality games.^[12]

A third book, titled Bible of the Dead (or The Lost Goddess outside the United Kingdom) was published in March 2011 in the UK, and in the US in February 2012,^[13] and focuses on the Khmer Rouge, while taking in the cave paintings of France, and modern Chinese Communism. More recently, Thomas has returned to Cambodia and written on the inspiration for this novel, when he attended the 2009 UN trial of Khmer Rouge apparatchik, Comrade Duch.^[14]

In 2015, under the pseudonym S K Tremayne, Thomas published a novel called The Ice Twins, about a London couple who lose a child, one of identical twins, and thereafter move to a remote island in Scotland. At this point the parents begin to suspect they have misidentified the surviving child. The Ice Twins became a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller in February 2015.^[15]

The same novel, translated as IJstweeling, went into the Dutch top ten bestseller list, following its publication in the Netherlands in March 2015.^[16] In May 2015, under the title Eisige Schwestern, the same book entered the Spiegel bestseller list, in Germany; the book went on to spend fifteen weeks in the German top ten.^[17] In September 2015, The Ice Twins, in paperback form, became a number one Sunday Times bestseller in the UK.^[18]

His second S K Tremayne novel, The Fire Child, became a top ten bestseller in Germany in January 2017, under the title Stiefkind.^[19]

In January 2019, The Ice Twins became a Nielsen Silver Award winner, for selling 250,000 copies in the UK.^[20]

His novel Kissing England won the Literary Review's "Bad Sex" award in 2000.^[21] Thomas's fourth book Millions Of Women Are Waiting To Meet You^[22] was a memoir of his love life; it was a best-seller, translated into eight languages, and was the Guardian newspaper's "paperback of the week" in May, 2007.^[23]

Personal life

Thomas has written extensively of his early, troubled life. In 1987 he was arrested, imprisoned and eventually acquitted, after a trial at the Old Bailey, of a rape charge brought by his then girlfriend.^[24][25] He has also described long struggles with drug addiction, especially heroin.^[26] In 2003 he wrote, in The Spectator, of how an addiction to internet porn caused him to "wank himself into hospital";^[27] in a follow-up article in 2022 he described how this in turn led to a renewed literary career, thanks to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.^[28] He has recently admitted to alcoholism,^[29] which he claims was "cured" by the weight-loss drug Ozempic.

He has two children, and lives in Camden,^[30] north London. He has been married once, to Star Brewer. They married in 2017 when he was 54 and she was 21, they divorced in 2021.

Bibliography

References

External links

• Tom Knox books website