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Best-selling author, Nick Toczek, is a full-time professional writer and performer who currently works variously as a poet, magician, storyteller, puppeteer, novelist, stand-up comic, radio DJ, political researcher, creative writing tutor, journalist, librettist, advertising copy-writer, and political speech-writer. He’s published over thirty books and has made about 40,000 public appearances. His poetry books alone have sold well over half a million copies.

As a writer in schools, he’s worked with pupils from around 5,000 schools. He also performs at festivals and family events, in libraries and prisons, on radio and TV, in colleges and residential homes, in pubs, clubs and community centres.

In recent years, he’s been a visiting writer at schools in China, France, Egypt and Italy and has toured Indonesia (Borneo, Sumatra, Bali and Java) working in schools and the community (with visits coming up to Kuwait and Thailand). He’s co-written a Babyshambles lyric (with Pete Doherty); has had a pantomime and a musical published; recently released a retrospective rock album (with a new one being recorded for release in 2009). He presents his own weekly show on local radio; had a poem featured in an award-winning TV advert; was the featured writer in a BAFTA-nominated programme for schools; has recently guested on BBC Radio 7’s Big Toe Radio Show and BBC Radio 4’s Go For It! and has been employed as a contributing consultant on the BBC’s Digital Curriculum for schools. He writes reviews, features and a regular column, Toxbox, for the Bradford-based rock fanzine, Mono, and also writes for the national music zine, Rock’n’Reel.

As well as gigging as a performer–poet and as a close-up and stage magician (for adults and/or for children), he regularly tours with his one-man show for families, Nick Toczek’s Million-Miles-An-Hour Show, which is a blend of his magic, poems, stories, puppets and comedy, with plenty of audience interaction and participation. For adult audiences, he works as a poet, comic, magician, etc.

In ’98, The Dragons Cantata, composer Malcolm Singer’s setting of some of Nick’s dragon poems, was performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall with a full symphony orchestra and an 800-strong combined schools choir. Perfect Pitch, their football cantata was premiered at The London Barbican in Jan. ’04. In December ’05, Golden Apple published Dragons! The Musical, a play-script by Nick set around songs from the cantata. Their latest project, Show Trial, is a commissioned political opera being premiered at The Arts Depot in London in Spring 2009, followed by performances at The Menuhin School in Surrey.

Nick, who’s a non-smoking vegetarian, is married with two children and one grandchild, lives in Bradford and buys far too much on ebay.

SOME PRESS QUOTES ABOUT NICK TOCZEK
On his performance poetry:
“The most exciting and visual performer we have this side of Benjamin Zephaniah” – NME.
“The greatest success was without doubt ‘Mr Dynamite’, the Englishman Nick Toczek whose performance of all-round writings exploded like a firework.” – German daily Neue Presse (reviewing an appearance at Frankfurt Bookfair)

On his stand-up comedy:
“See him if you can. He’s brilliant.” – The Stage.

On his children’s poetry books:
“A combination of straight-hitting humour and verbal dexterity. It is the well-honed work of a performance poet – crackling with rhythms, raps, rhymes and repetitions that beg to be read aloud and savoured for sound as well as amusing storylines.” - The Times Educational Supplement.

On his poetry for adult readers:
“A powerful writer who spins words into images with such seeming ease… He uses language in ways others can never hope to emulate” – U.S. Small Press Review.
“Toczek is bitter, disturbing and political. His language gets harder and more effective with each publication.” – The Guardian.

On his 2004 novel, Group of Heroes:
“A more interesting writer than most… an anti-novel, eschewing such bourgeois expectations as plot, continuity and coherence. It does it rather well, too. The pleasures come from Toczek’s linguistic mischief… and a playful demolition of the relationship between the narrator and his characters… something of a literary accomplishment…” – The Big Issue.

On his political writing:
“You should read Nick Toczek’s The Bigger Tory Vote… quite simply the best available guide to one of the most insidious forces in British political life.” – The Edinburgh Review.

On his editing:
“One of the liveliest (and) perhaps the most immediately accessible of small magazines.” – The Sunday Times (on Nick’s literary magazine, The Little Word Machine).
“Rapidly becoming one of the best rock magazines and certainly the one I look forward to reading.” – Radio One (the DJ John Peel on Nick’s music fanzine, The Wool City Rocker).

Best-selling author, Nick Toczek, is a full-time professional writer and performer who currently works variously as a poet, magician, storyteller, puppeteer, novelist, stand-up comic, radio DJ, political researcher, creative writing tutor, journalist, librettist, advertising copy-writer, and political speech-writer. He’s published over thirty books and has made about 40,000 public appearances.... More