Martin Booth (1944-2004) was a prolific British novelist, poet, critic and travel writer. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press. His many publications included The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village where he was living at the time, and the critical study, British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving through the barricades (1985). In the late 1970s he turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe (1985), was based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in the Japanese city during the Second World War. The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman. Martin Booth’s pamphlet, Looking for the Rainbow Sign: poems of America (1983), was an early Bloodaxe title. He co-edited the poetry and prose anthology, The Book of Cats, with George MacBeth, which was first published by Penguin in 1977 and reissued by Bloodaxe in 1991.
