Clifford Thurlow

Clifford Thurlow (born 1952, in London, England) trained as a journalist after failing to get a place at Cambridge and wrote his first book at the age of 23. He has been described by Penny Wark of The Times as "one of the UK's best ghostwriters."

Thurlow worked as the English editor of the Athens News under Yannis Horn during the last years of the Regime of the Colonels (1967–1974); he was 'asked' to leave the country when he reported on the anti-Junta speech given at the University by German author Günter Grass, who was held briefly under house arrest.

Rather than returning to the UK, Thurlow moved to India where he studied Buddhism in Dharamshala and worked with the Dalai Lama as one of a team translating Tibetan sacred texts into English.^[1] He traded gemstones in South East Asia and ran a travelling dolphin show in Spain before moving to Hollywood, where he penned Carol White's autobiography Carol Comes Home.

Thurlow considers Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me to be his first successful novel (Razor Books, 2000).^[2] He is noted for creating memoirs in the style of a novel. Recent books are Fatwa: Living With A Death Threat (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), which describes the flight of Jacky Trevane across the desert with two children to escape an abusive husband; Today I'm Alice (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2009) the story of Multiple Personality Disorder survivor Alice Jamieson, a Sunday Times Top Ten best-seller; and two books set in Iraq with former infantry captain turned mercenary James Ashcroft, Escape From Baghdad (Virgin, 2009), the rescue of Ashcroft's former Iraqi interpreter and his family from Shia Death Squads; and Making A Killing (Virgin, 2006) – on which Andy Martin wrote in The Daily Telegraph: "Ashcroft must have formed a good working alliance with ghostwriter Clifford Thurlow, because this diary of death and destruction radiates not just personality but that elusive, lyrical honesty the existentialists used to call authenticity."

Thurlow's Runaway (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Emily Mackenzie's story of life as a child prostitute in London's Soho in the early 1970s, spent five weeks in the Sunday Times Top Ten best-seller lists. Published in the wake of the Jimmy Savile child abuse scandal, Runaway was seen as having made an important contribution to the debate on the deficiencies of Britain's child care system.

In 2011, Thurlow became a director of www.yellowbay.co.uk, a publishing house dedicated to "edgy, daring and radical new writing". First digital/print-on-demand publications include Kindle best-selling trilogy The Killer 1,2 & 3, by Jack Elgos, Thurlow's novel Cocaine Confidence and David Pick's Mrs May: A PsychoSexual Odyssey