Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962 where his father was governor of HM Prison Camp Hill. The family shortly afterwards moved to Wandsworth Prison then on to Winchester. There Patrick was a Quirister at the cathedral choir school and then studied at Winchester College before reading English at New College, Oxford.
On graduating he lived for a while in London, working in various jobs while trying to become an actor but somehow became a novelist first, publishing his first two novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork on the same day in 1986. Kansas in August followed a year after that then, Facing The Tank, written while Patrick spent a year housesitting in remote South West France. The year in the country convinced him he needed to leave London and in 1988 he moved to Cornwall where he has lived ever since. He spent ten years living on the edge of Bodmin Moor, during which time he became closely involved as singer and administrator in the St Endellion Summer Festival, of which he would become chairman. He then met his husband, the farmer and sculptor, Aidan Hicks, and moved to Aidan’s farm at Land’s End.
Further novels included, Little Bits of Baby (1989), The Cat Sanctuary (1990), The Facts of Life (1995), Tree Surgery for Beginners (1998), Rough Music (2000), A Sweet Obscurity (2003), Friendly Fire, Notes From an Exhibition (2007), The Whole Day Through (2009), A Perfectly Good Man (2012), A Place Called Winter (2015) and Take Nothing With You(2018). There are also two collections of short stories, Dangerous Pleasure (1996) and Gentleman’s Relish (2009).
A keen cellist, he is secretary of the Penzance Orchestral Society as well as playing his baroque cello with the Heinichen Ensemble. He is a founding director of the Arts charity, Endelienta Arts, under whose auspices he started the North Cornwall Book Festival, of which he remains artistic director. He is patron of the Charles Causley Trust and the Penzance LitFest and proud to be a role model for the Albert Kennedy Trust.
In August 2017 his two part television drama, Man in an Orange Shirt was screened by BBC2 as part of the Gay Britannia season, which also featured the documentary All Families Have Secrets – the Narrative Art of Patrick Gale in which he was extensively interviewed by Stephen Fry. Patrick’s seventeenth novel, Mother’s Boy, which tells the story of the Cornish poet, Charles Causley and his indomitable mother, Laura, was published in 2022. He is now working on Love Lane, a sequel to A Place Called Winter, and also writing stage adaptations of Rough Music and Take Nothing With You as well as a musical based on Man in an Orange Shirt, which is now seeking producers.
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