Simon Van Booy was born at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey, on March 15, 1975 to Joan and Stephen Booy. He spent his childhood in Clwyd, a mountainous, rural area of North Wales, which features as a backdrop to many of his stories. In a 2007 interview, Van Booy described it as “a place of sheep, mud, and stars.”

Van Booy attended Borthyn Primary School and then Ruthin School, one of Britain’s most prestigious all-boys private schools established in the 13th century. Van Booy lived at the school as a boarder while his family relocated to the London suburbs. When he joined his family in the south of England, he gained admittance to Yateley Manor School [1], another all-boys private preparatory school. His parents moved again in 1989, and Van Booy entered Magdalen College School in Brackley, where he completed his formal education with only slightly better than average results. At the time of graduation, he was considered one of the school’s finest rugby players.

After attending lectures in law at Northampton College, Van Booy lost interest in academics and focused his attention on a promising rugby and football career. He played for Brackley Rugby Union Football Club, the county of Northamptonshire, and then moved on to have successful stints as a running back with the Northants Storm and the Milton Keynes Mavericks. In 1993, aged 18, Van Booy accepted a full scholarship to play football at Campbellsville University. Although Van Booy played only for one year, he met Dr. William Neal, a well-loved English professor who introduced Van Booy to American poets including Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Neal and another English professor, Dr. Sarah Stafford encouraged Van Booy to write short stories and poems.

Van Booy blossomed in the rigorously academic classrooms at Campbellsville University and became attached to the gentleness and generosity of the local people. In 1995, Van Booy left the college and moved back to the United Kingdom, settling in Plymouth. In 1996, after a summer spent living in a tent on the Isles of Scilly and at the bookshop Shakespeare & Co. in Paris with George Whitman, Van Booy was accepted at the University of Wales, Swansea where he spent his time either in the pub or at The Dylan Thomas Center listening to poetry readings. While studying in Wales, Van Booy met another lifelong friend, Iowa poet, Lucas Hunt, who now works at the Philip Spitzer Literary Agency where Van Booy is a client. After a largely unhappy year in Swansea, Van Booy transferred to the Dartington College of Arts, that has strong links with George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Siegfried Sassoon.

In 1999, after graduating from Dartington, Van Booy moved to Brussels briefly before taking a job as an English teacher in Athens, Greece. A week after arriving in Athens, Van Booy experienced the 1999 Athens earthquake. For half a year, Van Booy lived in an apartment that took up an entire floor, but which was largely unfurnished. He wrote for several hours daily on a British Olympia Splendid typewriter. In a 2009 newspaper interview with The East Hampton Star, Van Booy suggested that all young writers should live for a time in poverty...in order to develop the discipline of serious practice.

In 2000, based on an unfinished novel, Van Booy was awarded a merit fellowship to Southampton College, where he graduated with an M.F.A. two years later. While living in the Hamptons, Van Booy developed friendships with many leading writers including Roger Rosenblatt, Kaylie Jones, Hilary Knight, and Barbara Wersba. Despite publishing in The East Hampton Star and with Wersba’s private press, The Bookman Press...it wasn’t until 2006, when Van Booy met Jonathan Rabinowitz, a well-known New York aesthete and publisher of Turtle Point Press that his work became widely available to the public. In 2007, Turtle Point Press published The Secret Lives of People in Love to great acclaim by newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, which described the book as ‘Breathtaking.’ In January 2008, Van Booy signed a multiple book deal after one of his books was purchased and read by Carrie Kania, publisher of Harper Perennial.

In 2010, Harper Perennial will re-release his first book, The Secret Lives of People in Love with a bonus story. Also in 2010, Harper Perennial are publishing three volumes of philosophy edited by Van Booy, entitled, Why We Need Love, Why We Fight and Why Our Decisions Don't Matter.