Terence Blacker is a novelist and biographer who writes a twice-weekly opinion column for the Independent.

The son of a professional soldier, he was educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. After a spell in book publishing, he became a professional writer during the 1980s.

His first novel FIXX was published by Bloomsbury in 1989 – “Possibly Blacker has written one of the great rogues of literature,” wrote one critic – and was followed by THE FAME HOTEL (Bloomsbury, 1992) and REVENANCE (Bloomsbury, 1996). Of KILL YOUR DARLINGS, published in 2000 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and St Martin’s Press in America, the Washington Post wrote, “It is Blacker’s achievement that, even as he makes the madness of the writing game wildly funny, he also conveys the underlying tragedy of a marriage ruined, a son lost, a life wasted.”

Terence Blacker’s biography of his friend, the writer Willie Donaldson, was published by Ebury Press in 2006. Entitled YOU CANNOT LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED AND NOT END UP LIKE THIS: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson, it was read on BBC Radio 4 as 'Book of the Week' and described by India Knight in the Sunday Times as “utterly gripping…. hilarious… heartbreaking.”

A regular broadcaster on Radio 4 and Radio 3, Terence Blacker has also written award-winning  children’s books which have been published in 18 languages. He has devised and performed  a musical entertainment TABOO-BE-DO! Hits and Misses From the Politically Incorrect Songbook, which will be the basis of a Radio 4 series in 2011.

He lives in south Norfolk.