Paul Hoffman

Paul Hoffman (born 1953) is an English novelist and screenwriter, educated at New College, Oxford. Before turning to fiction he worked as a film censor for the British Board of Film Classification and wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film The Wisdom of Crocodiles, starring Jude Law, which he later reworked into a novel of the same name. He is best known for The Left Hand of God trilogy (The Left Hand of God, 2010; The Last Four Things, 2011; The Beating of His Wings, 2013), a coming-of-age fantasy following a boy raised by a brutal military-religious order who becomes both weapon and rebel against it; he returned to that world with The White Devil in 2021. His novel The Golden Age of Censorship (2007) is a dark comedy drawing on his years as a censor.