John Healy

John Healy was born in London in 1942. After a troubled childhood he became a boxer and according to his trainer, the great George Francis, ‘Healy was a stylist with concussive power in both hands’. He was tipped for the top, unfortunately in the end it was drink that carried the knockout blow. Already an alcoholic by his late teens he was pressed into the army and after getting drunk and resisting the guard he was transferred to a penal battalion in a military prison. Discharged onto the
street, he spent fifteen violent years in a wino jungle.

During one of his prison sentences another prisoner Harry Collins (known as ‘The Brighton Fox’) taught Healy to play chess. Showing a remarkable aptitude for the game he stopped drinking and won ten major chess tournaments.

In 1986, living hand-to-mouth on a council estate at King’s Cross, he wrote his ‘savage masterpiece,’ The Grass Arena which won the PEN Ackerley award (Europe’s top award for literary memoir) and was described on Radio 4 by Matthew Sweet as ‘one of the great works of the twentieth century.’ The book was made into a film (in which he was played by Mark Rylance) and between them they have a clutch of major national and international awards.

The Glass Cage is his second volume of memoir.