D.B.C. Pierre

Peter Warren Finlay, also known as DBC Pierre, is an Australian author who wrote the novel Vernon God Little. Pierre was born in South Australia and was largely raised in Mexico. He has resided in the Republic of Ireland and now, according to an August 2020 interview in The Guardian, lives in Cambridgeshire. Pierre was awarded the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Vernon God Little, his first novel, becoming the third Australian-born author to be so honored. 

Upon winning the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003, he became the first writer to receive a Man Booker and a Whitbread for the same book. The book also won the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for comic literature at the Hay Festival in 2003. It earned the author a James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Born in Old Reynella, South Australia, where his father was lecturing in genetics at the University of Adelaide, Pierre had, by the age of two, already spent time in the United States, the South Pacific, and Great Britain. 

He was then raised from early childhood into his 20s in Mexico City's community of Jardines del Pedregal and attended Edron Academy. Pierre was taken to revisit his home by Alan Yentob for the BBC television series Imagine in 2004. In a Guardian article of 1 September 2004, he recalls that he would return to Durham most years, usually around the second week in July, to see the Durham Miners Gala. Aged seven, he fell ill with hepatitis and spent a year in bed. 

After he recovered, his parents chose to keep him a year behind in school or let him stay in his class and just catch up. They chose the latter. Pierre sees this as the moment "when all the trouble began... " as it means his falling out with his peers. His father, once decorated as a Lancaster Bomber pilot in World War II, by then a scientific partner to Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug, fell ill when Pierre was sixteen and died three years later.

Pierre's permanent residency in Mexico ended at Reynosa on the United States-Mexican border in the middle of the night when he claimed he was stopped trying to import a 6-liter sports car. He claims he intended to drive through the Sonoran Desert to Mexico City. Still, Mexico at the time had a protectionist auto industry, making foreign vehicle imports illegal to all but tourists. Pierre succeeded in crossing with the car but found his papers canceled when he reached Mexico City some 18 hours later. 

The border crossing at Reynosa is described and celebrated in Pierre's novel Vernon God Little, as is the journey by road from the border. Pierre asserts that nine of the following years were spent in a drug-induced haze, culminating with a stay in Australia, where he finally collapsed. He described this period of his life in an interview given on the Australian television show Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in 2006:

I was lucky enough to be in Australia then, having come back to try my luck. The support network was fantastic. There's immediately the safety net under you here, which, in the rest of the world, I wouldn't have survived, definitely. But, here, I was taken into therapy, where they told me that ... I was in the grip of bad psychology, and that this rabbit was never going to come out of the hat and I should get used to the idea, which was what I needed at the time.

During his twenties, he had been involved in film production to explore the fall of the Aztec Empire and follow trials to the remains of Aztec Emperor Moctezuma and possibly his lost treasure, the whereabouts of which remains one of Mexico's great mysteries. During the 1990s, he wrote his first novel whilst living in Balham, south London, finally agreeing on a publication deal with Faber & Faber on 11 September 2001. 

In the following weeks, he relocated to County Leitrim, Ireland, where he began work on a second novel. The Man Booker Prize comes with a monetary award of £50,000. Upon being notified of his victory, Pierre said that the money would go part way toward paying off the debts incurred in his 20s when psychological issues and drug abuse were driving forces. The letters in his pen name stand for "Dirty but clean" in reference to his former hardships.