Alex Garland's Real Name: Alex Garland

Quick answer: The novelist and filmmaker is known professionally as Alex Garland. Encyclopedia.com dates the birth to 1970 in London, England, and identifies him as English. A 2015 Guardian interview independently describes him as 44 in January 2015 and says The Beach was published in 1996, when he was 26. This page titles him under the public name.

Real name and early life

Independent publishers identify him under the professional name Alex Garland. Encyclopedia.com says he was born in London, England, in 1970, attended Manchester University, and received the Betty Trask prize in 1998. The Guardian independently says that after graduating from Manchester University with a degree in history of art he began to draw comic books, that his father, Nicholas Garland, was a political cartoonist, and that his mother, Caroline, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. A later 2024 Guardian interview also says he grew up around journalists in London.

Career highlights

Encyclopedia.com lists the novels The Beach (New York, Riverhead Books, 1997) and The Tesseract (1999). The Guardian independently says The Beach was published in 1996 and was later made into a film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, a 2000 film date recorded in the 2024 interview. The 2015 interview also records later screenplays including 28 Days Later and Sunshine, both directed by Boyle, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and his first film as a director, the science-fiction thriller Ex Machina. The 2024 Guardian interview independently lists a string of screenwriting credits beginning with 28 Days Later (2002), the directorial debut Ex Machina (2015), later films including Annihilation (2018), Men (2022), and Civil War, plus video games and the television series Devs. That 2024 account also identifies DNA Films as his production partners since The Beach became a film, and says Civil War was made with A24. In that interview Garland said he was not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future. The 2015 Guardian interview independently says The Beach was reprinted 25 times in a one-year period and later records a novella among his work after that novel. Encyclopedia.com independently describes The Tesseract as a later novel set in the Philippines, constructed from interwoven narrative lines.

Name notes for searchers

People looking up Alex Garland are looking for the same novelist and filmmaker, including The Beach and later film work most often associated with his name. This page uses the public professional name. Search traffic often uses the professional name Alex Garland alone.