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John Niven (born 1966) is a Scottish author and screenwriter. His books include Kill Your Friends , The Amateurs, and The Second Coming.
Born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Niven read English literature at the University of Glasgow, graduating in 1991 with First Class honours. For the next ten years, he worked for a variety of record companies, including London Records and Independiente. He left the music industry to write full-time in 2002 and published Music from Big Pink, a book about The Band’s album of the same name, in 2005 (Continuum Press). The book was optioned for the screen by CC Films with a script written by English playwright Jez Butterworth.
Niven's breakthrough novel Kill Your Friends is a satire of the music business, based on his brief career in A&R, during which he passed up the chance to sign Coldplay and Muse. The novel was published by William Heinemann in 2008 to much acclaim, with The Word magazine describing it as "possibly the best British Novel since Trainspotting". It has been translated into seven languages and was a bestseller in Britain and Germany. Niven has since published The Amateurs (2009), The Second Coming (2011), Cold Hands (2012), Straight White Male (2013), The Sunshine Cruise Company (2015), [1] No Good Deed (2017) and Kill 'em All (2018). [2]
He also writes original screenplays with writing partner Nick Ball, the younger brother of British TV presenter Zoë Ball. His journalistic contributions to newspapers and magazines include a monthly column for Q magazine , entitled "London Kills Me". In 2009 Niven wrote a controversial article for The Independent newspaper where he attacked the media's largely complacent coverage of Michael Jackson's death. [3]
In 2005 he co-wrote the lyrics of two songs on James Dean Bradfield's album The Great Western . [4]
Niven co-wrote the screenplay How to Build a Girl, opposite Caitlin Moran, based upon her novel of the same name, directed by Coky Giedroyc. [5]
Niven contributes regularly to Noble Rot Magazine , an independent publication about wine and food, and the Daily Record. [6]
An atheist and a republican, Niven refuses to sing "God Save the Queen" on ideological grounds.[ citation needed ]
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries—Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—all professed strong admiration for his writing, and author John O'Hara directly attributed his understanding of dialogue to him.
William Goldman was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist before turning to screenwriting. Among other accolades, Goldman won two Academy Awards in both writing categories—once for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and once for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men (1976).
James David Graham Niven was a British actor, soldier, memoirist, and novelist. Niven was known as a handsome and debonair leading man in Classic Hollywood films. He received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.
David Adams Richards is a Canadian writer and member of the Canadian Senate.
Kill 'Em All is the debut studio album by the American heavy metal band Metallica, released on July 25, 1983, through the independent label Megaforce Records. After forming in 1981, Metallica began by playing shows in local clubs in Los Angeles. They recorded several demos to gain attention from club owners and eventually relocated to San Francisco to secure the services of bassist Cliff Burton. The group's No Life 'til Leather demo tape (1982) was noticed by Megaforce label head Jon Zazula, who signed them and provided a budget of $15,000 for recording. The album was recorded in May with producer Paul Curcio at the Music America Studios in Rochester, New York. It was originally intended to be titled Metal Up Your Ass, with cover art featuring a hand clutching a dagger emerging from a toilet bowl. Zazula convinced the band to change the name because distributors feared that releasing an album with such an offensive title and artwork would diminish its chances of commercial success.
Stanley Lloyd Kaufman Jr., known professionally as Lloyd Kaufman is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. Alongside producer Michael Herz, he is the co-founder of Troma Entertainment film studio, and the director of many of their feature films, such as The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Tromeo and Juliet (1996). Many of the strategies employed by him at Troma have been credited with making the film industry significantly more accessible and decentralized.
Catherine ElizabethMoran is an English journalist, broadcaster, and author at The Times, where she writes two columns a week: one for the Saturday Magazine, and the satirical Friday column "Celebrity Watch".
(Robert) Geoffrey Trease FRSL was a prolific British writer who published 113 books, mainly for children, between 1934 and 1997, starting with Bows Against the Barons and ending with Cloak for a Spy in 1997. His work has been translated into 20 languages. His grandfather was a historian, and was one of the main influences on his work. He is best known for the children's novel Cue for Treason (1940).
The Elusive Pimpernel is a 1950 British period adventure film by the British-based director-writer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. It was released in the United States under the title The Fighting Pimpernel. The picture stars David Niven as Sir Percy Blakeney, Margaret Leighton as Marguerite Blakeney and features Jack Hawkins, Cyril Cusack and Robert Coote. Originally intended to be a musical, the film was re-worked as a light-hearted drama.
Elechi Amadi was a Nigerian author and soldier. He was a former member of the Nigerian Armed Forces. He was an author of plays and novels that are generally about African village life, customs, beliefs, and religious practices prior to contact with the Western world. Amadi is best regarded for his 1966 debut novel, The Concubine, which has been called "an outstanding work of pure fiction".
The Great Western is the debut solo studio album by the Manic Street Preachers vocalist-guitarist James Dean Bradfield. It was released on 24 July 2006 by record label Columbia.
Michael Arndt is an American screenwriter. He is best known as the writer of the films Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).
John Powell is an English composer best known for his film scores. He has been based in Los Angeles since 1997 and has composed the scores to over 70 feature films. He is best known for composing score for films, including Face/Off, the Bourne film series, the Happy Feet films, United 93, X-Men: The Last Stand, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Migration, Drumline, The Call of the Wild, Bolt, eight Blue Sky Studios films, and nine DreamWorks Animation films.
Kill Your Friends is the debut novel by the Scottish writer John Niven. It was published in 2008 by William Heinemann.
James Bond is a fictional character created by the British journalist and novelist Ian Fleming in 1952. The character first appeared in a series of twelve novels and two short story collections written by Fleming and a number of continuation novels and spin-off works after Fleming's death in 1964. Bond's literary portrayal differs in some ways from his treatment in the James Bond films, of which there have been twenty-seven in total, produced and released between 1962 and 2021.
Barbara Lee Niven is an American actress, writer, and producer, best known for her performances in Hallmark and Lifetime movies, and for television roles in Pensacola: Wings of Gold, One Life to Live, Cedar Cove, and Chesapeake Shores. Niven had the leading role in the independent film A Perfect Ending (2012). She is also a motivational speaker, media trainer and animal rights activist, and a National Ambassador for American Humane.
Brian Edward Kelley is an American musician, best known as a member of the Nashville-based duo Florida Georgia Line. Kelley is from Ormond Beach, Florida, and enjoyed playing sports and music growing up. He moved to Nashville to go to school and play baseball at Belmont University, where he met Tyler Hubbard, the other member of Florida Georgia Line.
Arthur J. Raffles is a fictional character created in 1898 by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Raffles is, in many ways, an inversion of Holmes – he is a "gentleman thief", living at the Albany, a prestigious address in London, playing cricket as a gentleman for the Gentlemen of England and supporting himself by carrying out ingenious burglaries. He is called the "Amateur Cracksman" and often, at first, differentiates between him and the "professors" – professional criminals from the lower classes.
Kill Your Friends is a 2015 British satirical black comedy crime-thriller film directed by Owen Harris and written by John Niven based on his 2008 novel of the same name. The film stars Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, Tom Riley, and Georgia King. It was selected to be shown in the city to City section of the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. The film was released by StudioCanal on 6 November 2015.
How to Build a Girl is a 2014 coming-of-age novel by English author and journalist Caitlin Moran, published by Ebury Press.