Tom McCarthy is a novelist and is known in the art world for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semifictitious avant-garde network. His books include C and Satin Island, both of which were short-listed for the Booker Prize; Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works; and Men in Space. In 2013 McCarthy was awarded an inaugural Windham Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University. He contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum.

McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London; Columbia University, New York City; and Städelschule Frankfurt (DE). In 2019 he guest-curated the exhibition Empty House of the Stare at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, and in 2022 will guest-curate a major exhibition Holding Pattern in Kunstnernes Hus Oslo (NO), exploring themes and motifs of his work. He lives in Berlin, where in 2019 he was a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme.