About
A continuous, first-person account — childhood, the path to writing, and where things stand today.
Martin Goodman sat down to become a writer at the age of twelve. Three months later he concluded the market wasn't quite ready for him, and settled in to wait — which is more or less what he has been doing, gloriously, ever since.
He was born just after Christmas in 1956, in a terraced house in Leicester, and went to school at Loughborough Grammar. For a while he weighed becoming a chef, then a lawyer; he turned down the chance to inherit his father's electroplating business. Writing won, on the clear understanding that recognition might take decades. It did. In the meantime there was a living to be made and, more to the point, writing time to be bought. So he bought it, job by job.
In 1975 he worked in a department store in West Berlin, then read English at Leeds. He taught — in the Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China, and the length of England and Scotland, to every age and level — going back to Leeds for a diploma in teaching English as a second language along the way. He cleaned the insides of aeroplanes. He worked retail, acted, played cocktail piano and barroom organ, and toured schools with Scottish Opera for Youth, staging two children's operas a day. Every shift was, in the end, the same shift: earning the hours to write.
Photo: the teaching years
The travelling seeded the books. India gave him the spiritual biography In Search of the Divine Mother and the high pilgrimage of On Sacred Mountains, and made him an editor of India's Conservation Times. Peru gave him I Was Carlos Castaneda, his immersion in shamanism, of which the Los Angeles Times wrote:
"Such narrow, narrow confines we live in. Every so often, one of us primates escapes these dimensions, as Martin Goodman did. All we can do is rattle the bars and look after him as he runs into the hills. We wait for his letters home."
— The Los Angeles Times
Germany gave him two novels, among them The Cellist of Dachau, which sets music against the Holocaust. Germany also gave him James Thornton. In 1991 the two men met on the doorstep of the holy woman Mother Meera; by 1994 they were partners, living a transatlantic life between a village in the French Pyrenees and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2001, so they could simply be in the same place, James gave up his country and his career and came to England. There he founded ClientEarth, now the world's leading environmental law group — a story Martin would later tell with James in Client Earth, which took Judges' Choice in the UK's Business Book of the Year and Green Book of the Year from the Santa Monica libraries.
Martin, meanwhile, took a PhD in creative writing at Lancaster and moved into academia, becoming Director of the Philip Larkin Centre and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull, where he taught for ten years and is now Emeritus Professor.
Across fourteen books, the honours have kept pace with the wandering. His debut, On Bended Knees — recently re-released — was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Suffer & Survive, his life of the self-experimenting scientist J. S. Haldane, won Best Book, Basis of Medicine, in the British Medical Association's awards. My Head for a Tree, shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award for Nature Writing, carried him to the Bishnoi of Rajasthan, the world's first eco-warriors; his 2025 eco-cyber thriller The Boy on the Train brings the fight up to date.
The novella Swimming for England, a sardonic look at how his home country can be both welcoming and toxic, derived from his play that won the Pen is a Mighty Sword International Playwriting Award. He founded and runs the independent publishing house Barbican Press, was once a New Generation Thinker for BBC Radio, and has made radio documentaries on pioneering British architecture and on the writer Alan Garner.
Research for new nonfiction books stacks up in his file boxes; hours of interviews fill hard drives; fictional ideas churn through his head; his books are habitually drafted and redrafted over decades. When their time is right, they come into the world. For a while they were building a life in Los Angeles, alongside founding a new ClientEarth office in Santa Monica. Then the Palisades Fire came close, the political weather turned against incomers such as Martin, and James was awarded a professorship at Oxford. They returned to the UK. You might spot them in the Meadows at Oxford's edge. Martin would like a dog. James likes a tidy house. So they take each other for walks.
The books carry the rest of the story.
