The top 10 fictitious biographies

Jonathan Gibbs is a writer and journalist born in Trinidad, raised in Essex, and living, now, in London. His debut novel is Randall.

For the Guardian, Gibbs tagged his top ten biographies of made-up persons as if they were real. (Note: these are not fictionalized biographies – novels based on the life of a famous person. There are many of those.) One title on the list:

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Woolf's light-hearted "escapade" is a satirical romp through the very idea of a biography, with its portrait of a nobleman who lives from the Elizabethan era right through to the 1920s, somehow changing gender along the way. Its sentence-by-sentence delight in evoking past times offers a model that few "proper" historical accounts can hope to follow – not least because it's skipped on a decade before they've tied their bootlaces.

Read about another entry on the list.

Orlando is among Sam Mills's top ten fictional sex changes.

--Marshal Zeringue