Martin Booth (1944-2004) was a British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and founded the Sceptre Press. He was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, and left for Britain in 1964. He first made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing slim volumes by British and American poets. His own books of verse include the two Knotting books collected in this volume, as well as Killing the Moscs and Meeting the Snowy North Again. In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War. His lifelong interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers, and also a study of the endangered rhino. Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. He was also fond of the United States, and of Italy, which features in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990; later filmed as The American, starring George Clooney, in 2010). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies. His novel, Industry of Souls, was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. He died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.
