Katherine Rundell's Biographies-with-a-difference
By Faber
Katherine Rundell's Biographies-with-a-difference
By Faber
Katherine Rundell has just been announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022!
"While I was writing about John Donne, I was trying to find ways to write about a long-dead man that wouldn't just feel like beginning at the birth and ploughing your way through to the death bed. He was so brilliant, so complicated and so pugilistically alive, and he needs books that lay out how magnificent and peculiar he was. These were some of the biographies I turned to, to see how you can take an old topic and make it galvanic and new."
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
Craig Brown
£10.99 £10.44Craig Brown's book about the Beatles is big - large enough to kill a man with - but is never once, at any second, boring; it's so witty, and so razor-sharp.
Zami: A New Spelling of my Name
Audre Lorde
£9.99 £9.49Lorde called it 'biomythography': it encompasses myth, history, biography, fury, love. It's electric writing.
This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright
Emma Smith
£10.99 £10.44Emma Smith writes brilliant, funny, irreverent books: she pushes aside details about dates and who-bought-who's-horse to show you how to find Shakespeare where he shines most: in his plays. This is my favourite book about Shakespeare.
Up in the Old Hotel
Joseph Mitchell
£14.99 £14.24This is a biography of New York and its people, told in a series of monologues. It's one of the books I've read most hungrily: delicious and strange and as gripping as a thriller.
Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
Frances Wilson
£16.99De Quincey was funny and odd and obsessive (he was, more or less, Wordsworth's stalker) and Frances Wilson's book is brilliant and unpredictable.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
£9.99 £9.49Baldwin's semi-autobiographical novel is still, I think, one of the finest things ever written: it's harsh and bold and full of love and sorrow, and the structure, which darts across flash backs and multiple character's perspectives, makes it feel like you have been in the presence of a great chorus of lives.