Richard Mason's new novel The Lighted Rooms Contemporary writer Richard Mason is what´s known as a publishing phenomenon. In 1999 his first novel The Drowning People was bought for a large sum, became an international bestseller and won the Italian equivalent of the Booker prize while he was still a student at Oxford University. The amount of attention he received after the book's publication was the beginning of a complicated journey that he says involved some very high points, very low points, two panic attacks and a lot of learning. He also wrote two more novels. The most recent, The Lighted Rooms, is about to be released in Australia.
