Damage (19 page)

Josephine Hart is the international bestselling author of six novels and two poetry anthologies. Her novels, which include
Damage
(1991),
Sin
(1992), and
Oblivion
(1995), are notable for their spare prose and themes of lust, betrayal, and obsessive love, and have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Hart was born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland, and later moved to London to pursue careers in publishing, theater, and then writing. In the mid-1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour, an event that grew from her desire to make poetry a powerful force in people’s lives. While working as a director at Haymarket Publishing, Hart poured herself into Gallery Poets and ultimately went on to produce a number of West End plays, including Iris Murdoch’s “The Black Prince.” Shortly after marrying Maurice Saatchi, an advertising executive and former Chairman of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, Hart began creating the characters for her first three books but resisted the urge to commit them to paper. It wasn’t until Murdoch and Saatchi encouraged her to write a book that she finally decided to do so. Her first novel,
Damage
, about a British politician’s affair with his son’s fiancè, was a critical and commercial triumph, selling more than one million copies worldwide.
Damage
was made into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.

Hart’s subsequent novels have also received wide acclaim and success, and in 2007
The Reconstructionist
was filmed by Italian director Roberto Ando. Her latest novel,
The Truth About Love
, was published in 2009 by Knopf and will be published in paperback in the U.S. in August 2010. She continues to support poetry, saying that it “gives voice to experience in a way no other literary art form can. It has never let me down.” The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a monthly poetry reading at London’s British Library, has attracted such readers as Bono, Bob Geldof, and Ralph Fiennes, among many others, since its inception in 2004, and the anthologies
Catching Life by the Throat
(2006) and
Words that Burn
(2008) are accompanied by CDs based on these readings.

Hart and Saatchi have two sons and divide their time between homes in England and France.

Hart during her first Communion at age seven in her hometown of Mullingar, Ireland.

A twelve-year-old Hart riding a pony during a visit to the Dublin Zoo.

Hart’s school picture, taken in Ireland during the 1960s. She is sitting on the nun’s immediate left. Hart moved to London later in the decade.

Hart in Dublin, Ireland, where she was judging the 1992 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The winner that year was
Mating
by Norman Rush.

Maurice Saatchi and Hart at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in London in the early 1990s. Saatchi is the co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi and MC Saatchi, two of the world’s largest advertising firms.

Ian McDiarmid, Hart, and Jonathan Kent on the stage of the Almeida Theatre in London.

Hart and Iris Murdoch.

From left: Charles Dance, Rupert Evans, Josephine Hart, and Jeremy Irons at her Poetry Hour at the British Library celebrating Robert Browning in 2009.

Josephine Hart in her garden in London in spring 2010.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1991 by Josephine Hart

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0006-3

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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