0 ratings | 0 reviews | avg rating:0.0

John Biggins’s Followers (53)

John’s Bookshelves

to-read (0)
currently-reading (0)
read (0)

John’s Friends (1)

Eamon McCarthy Earls

141 books | 7 friends

John Biggins

Goodreads Author

Born

in Bromley, The United Kingdom

Website

https://www.johnbiggins.net/

Genre

Historical Fiction, Humor and Comedy

Member Since

September 2013

edit data

John Biggins was born in October 1949 in the town of Bromley; then in Kent but now an outer suburb of London and notable only as the birthplace of H.G.Wells and the deathplace of the Emperor Napoleon III. The son of an electrician and part-time Communist Party activist, his childhood was sickly and his schooling intermittent; though he made up for this with a great deal of precocious reading while lying ill in bed. In 1961 he moved with his family to South Wales, his father having in the meantime abandoned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to become a steelworks engineer, and decided from then on that he would no longer waste time being ill. After attending Chepstow Secondary and Lydney Grammar Schools, then reading history at the Univers John Biggins was born in October 1949 in the town of Bromley; then in Kent but now an outer suburb of London and notable only as the birthplace of H.G.Wells and the deathplace of the Emperor Napoleon III. The son of an electrician and part-time Communist Party activist, his childhood was sickly and his schooling intermittent; though he made up for this with a great deal of precocious reading while lying ill in bed. In 1961 he moved with his family to South Wales, his father having in the meantime abandoned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to become a steelworks engineer, and decided from then on that he would no longer waste time being ill. After attending Chepstow Secondary and Lydney Grammar Schools, then reading history at the University of Wales in Swansea from 1968 to 1971, he went to then-Soviet Bloc Poland and remained there for the next four years studying for a Ph.D. This experience gave him an enduring fascination with institutional dysfunction and the pathology of decaying empires; as did his subsequent four years of unemployment in the now-abolished Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food where one of his tasks was to write a history of the 1974 Cheese Subsidy in such a way as to show his then-boss in the best possible light: a job which he undertook with such creative relish that he was soon moved to another department.

After being advised politely but firmly to leave the Civil Service in 1980 he turned to journalism to support his wife and two children, then to technical authorship in the burgeoning IT industry of the mid-1980s, then to writing fiction in 1987 largely in order to amuse himself without much expectation that what he wrote would ever published. So it was with some surprise two years later that he found his first novel, A Sailor of Austria, being taken up by the first publisher who had a sight of it. In later years his day-job, by now largely in medical engineering, took him to France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands where he occupied his evenings by reading in the local languages in an effort to try and understand what was going on around him. Later on, two years spent writing and teaching an English course for Polish doctors also allowed him to develop a long-standing interest in medical history and led to his latest series of novels.

Despite advancing years he remains as neurotically active as ever, tirelessly roaming the landscape of whichever country fate has deposited him in with a map in his hand as though other people’s word wasn’t good enough for him and he really expects to discover lost temples or hitherto unknown tribes amid the flat waterlogged fields and motorway junctions of the Rhine-Meuse delta. An inveterate cyclist, he is currently much engaged in reviving the bicycle as a mass means of transport in Great Britain.

Since 2012 he has lived in the extreme south of France, in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border, and is now an Irish citizen. ...more

3 posts
John Biggins's Blog

Coming soon: expanded distribution for all titles

From 30th November 2021, all John Biggins paperback titles will be available to order from your local independent bookstore, and will also be made available in ePub format on the Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and most other e-book stores. Amazon Kindle versions will continue to be available as before.

For help or more information, please contact Bonanova Editions at: bonanovaeditions@gm

Combine Editions
John Biggins’s books

Average rating: 4.32 · 1,581 ratings · 181 reviews · 15 distinct works • Similar authors

	A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire (The Otto Prohaska Novels Book 1) 4.30 avg rating — 844 ratings — published 1991 — 20 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Interesting Time While Not Quite Managing to Avert the First World War (The Otto Prohaska Novels Book 2) 4.27 avg rating — 266 ratings — published 1992 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thanklessly Dangerous (The Otto Prohaska Novels Book 3) 4.40 avg rating — 229 ratings — published 1993 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tomorrow the World: In which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa and Oceania 4.36 avg rating — 169 ratings — published 1994 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Surgeon's Apprentice (van Raveyck, #1) 4.25 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2010 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Lion Ascendant (van Raveyck, #2) 4.50 avg rating — 20 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Sailor of Austria( In Which Without Really Intending To Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire)[SAILOR OF AUSTRIA][Paperback] 4.43 avg rating — 7 ratings — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tomorrow the World: In which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa and Oceania (The Otto Prohaska Novels Book 4) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tomorrow the World: in Which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa & Oceania (The Otto Prohaska Novels) (Paperback) - Common it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tomorrow the World , A Sailor of Austria , The Emperor's Coloured Coat ,The Two - Headed Eagle it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by John Biggins…

Series by John Biggins

Otto Prohaska (4 books)
by

John Biggins (Goodreads Author)

4.32 avg rating — 1,508 ratings

van Raveyck (2 books)
by

John Biggins (Goodreads Author)

4.33 avg rating — 60 ratings

Quotes by John Biggins (?)

“I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.”
― John Biggins, A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire

tags: camel, humor, humour, submarine, ww1

5 likes

“It is a curiously moving experience, to hear 350 sailors uttering the words "Oh shit!" in eleven different languages.”
― John Biggins, The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Interesting Time While Not Quite Managing to Avert the First World War

tags: humor, humour

3 likes

“In fact the bare adjective "bad" hardly scratches the surface of the man's awesome incapacity.”
― John Biggins, The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Interesting Time While Not Quite Managing to Avert the First World War

tags: humor, humour

2 likes

See all John Biggins's quotes »