Michael Thomas (Man Gone Down author)

[3] He currently lives in New York City,[2] claiming to have never had a proper job although he has worked in several areas, including bars, restaurants, construction, pizza delivery, on film sets and driving a taxi.

[4] Later, whilst attending graduate school, he studied a fiction program, with his thesis being a collection of short stories.

[4] "One day I was doing my laundry and I realised the breaks were chapters, not pages, and I started writing a novel," Thomas said.

[2][4][5] Thomas was the third author to win with a debut novel, following Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain (1999) and Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game (2007).

[4] The book was praised by the judges, who included James Ryan, for its "energy and warmth" and for being "tuned urgently to the way we live now".

[4] Man Gone Down beat an international longlist of 147 titles from 41 countries, as well as seven other shortlisted nominations such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, as well as novels by established authors such as Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth.