Mark Haddon for Leaving Home

Writer and artist Mark Haddon takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the '60s and '70s Midlands. He joins his beautiful original and altered childhood images with his sharp prose.

Leaving Home is about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier mache and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. As bracing as it is embracing, it's about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.

Haddon's parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house, but at least Mark had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham.

Mark Haddon's bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seventeen literary prizes, was translated into forty-five languages, and became an award-winning stage adaptation by Simon Stephens. His most recent works of fiction include The Porpoise.