Sinclair, who was born into a
Jewish family originally named
Smolensky, grew up in
Hendon, Although his writing career began with short stories that appeared in magazines and journals, his first book was a novel –
Bibliosexuality – which was published in 1973 by
Allison and Busby. As he said in a 2012 interview: "The truth is I've always been a short story writer rather than a novelist.
Bibliosexuality was originally a collection of short stories about a certain David Drollkind.
Margaret Busby said she would publish it, if I could find a way of linking them. That's how it became a novel." He subsequently published several novels and collections of shorter fiction, in addition to non-fiction, such as biography and travel writing. His stories, interviews, travel pieces and reviews appeared in a wide range of publications, including
Encounter,
The Year’s Best Horror Stories,
New Review,
London Magazine,
Penthouse,
Club International,
Transatlantic Review,
Lilith,
Monat,
The Guardian,
The Independent, and
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS). He had been the
British Library Penguin Writer's Fellow, as well as a visiting lecturer, most frequently at the
University of East Anglia (UEA), but also at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, his special subjects being
gothic fiction, creative writing,
detective fiction, and
Holocaust literature. His other books include
A Soap Opera From Hell: Essays on the Facts of Life and the Facts of Death (1998), ''Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West
(2008), and Death & Texas'' (2014). Sinclair was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 1983. Sinclair died in March 2018, aged 70. A posthumous collection of his work, entitled
Shylock Must Die – based on the character
Shylock in
Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice – was published in July 2018. == Personal life ==