Michael Cox
Birth Date 25 October 1948
Death Date 31 March 2009
Personal Name Cox, Michael
Official Sites
Michael Cox was born in Wellingborough in 1948, and grew up in Northamptonshire where his parents worked in the shoe industry. Bed-bound at three with a prolonged ear infection, he learnt to read. A key moment in Cox's life occured when, staying with his grandparents, he saw from a window that the neighbours were burying fine Victorian books – well bound, lavishly tooled – as they thought such things harboured disease. He and his grandparents saved them, and he was ever after absorbed in them, especially the Arabian Nights tales.
Fiction became a passion, and from Wellingborough Grammar School he went to St Catharines College, Cambridge where an academic career looked likely until he was asked to perform a score alongside a friend's silent film. In classic fashion, a talent scout saw him and Cox was offered a contract. He released two albums on EMI under the name Matthew Ellis.
In 1977 he had begun working for the Northamptonshire publisher Thorsons, noted for its health list. In 1979, Cox published The Subversive Vegetarian (published again in 1985 as The New Vegetarian).
Cox was now a freelance copy editor, working with panache and drawing out writers' intentions without imposing himself. His employers included OUP, for whom he had also written an elegant, popular biography of M.R. James (1983). Cox's taste for Victorian fiction led to his joining OUP's reference division in 1989. As well as his own anthologies of ghost stories, Victorian ghost stories and similar works, he produced The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (2002), but he developed a rare form of cancer that led to his early retirement in 1997. Hard-up after leaving OUP, he copy-edited, mainly for HarperCollins.
After tumours that threatened his vision were eased for a time by a major operation in 2004, he began work in earnest on a long-planned novel. Fearful of vanishing eyesight, he turned his jottings into a hefty book, The Meaning of Night (2006), for which, after a bidding war, he received an advance of £500,000, an unprecedented amount for a first novel. Cox's next novel, The Glass of Time (2008), is if anything even more gripping.
In the autumn of 2005 he found that his cancer had returned and that his sight was fading. At the time of his death he was working on a third novel.