Luke Jennings


Luke Jennings is a British author and journalist.

Background

Jennings trained as a dancer at the Rambert School, studied Indian languages, and produced and directed a Channel 4 documentary filmed in Bombay.
As a journalist, Jennings has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and has reported from locations around the world, including Moscow. He was dance critic for The Observer and also wrote dance-related articles for Time.

Published works

Jennings' first novel, Breach Candy, follows a recently-retired ballerina and an intelligent-but-wounded television director researching a Channel 4 documentary in Bombay.
Jennings' novel, Atlantic, which takes place in a cruise ship in the post-war years, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Beauty Story is a novel about a young actress who vanishes from a 16th-century English castle where she was filming a fragrance commercial.
Blood Knots: Of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing—a 2010 memoir about fishing, and about "childhood innocence, paternal love, and his friendship with the charismatic, enigmatic" man who was later killed by the IRA while working as an intelligence officer in Ireland—was shortlisted for the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize and for the William Hill prize.
With his daughter, Jennings co-wrote the Stars youth fiction series, about teenagers at a performing arts school.
Jennings co-authored The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet.
Jennings' 2018 book Codename Villanelle, a compilation of three serial Kindle edition novellas published between 2014–2016, was the basis for BBC America's Killing Eve television series. Though his 2019 sequel ' diverged from the television show, the books and show are said to "share common DNA" because of Jennings' continued collaboration with the show's creators. A third volume of the Villanelle series, ', was released on March 19, 2020.