DBC Pierre

Pierre Finlay (later DBC Pierre, the initials mockingly standing for 'Dirty But Clean') was born in Reseda, California, to Australian parents and raised largely in Mexico City in considerable privilege until his father's death collapsed the family's fortune.

He spent years afterward drifting through addiction, gambling debts, and outright fraud, including selling a house that was not fully his to sell, before getting clean in his forties and turning to fiction as, by his own account, a way of making amends.

Vernon God Little (2003), his first novel, narrates a Texan teenager wrongly swept up as an accomplice in a school shooting, fleeing toward Mexico while American media and small-town gossip turn his ordeal into a circus; the satire won both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has since settled mostly in Ireland, continuing to write fiction.