Literary Biography

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes...

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow,...

'Baldwin wrote in arias of feeling and thought... [He] proved that if he wrote it down, it could have power beyond the moment.' - Hilton AlsIn this deeply personal book,...

The first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. 'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly . . . Subtle, unpredictable,...

Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literary landscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizes...

TWO LIVES tells the remarkable story of Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle Shanti left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a...

Nearing 70, and in what would be the last decade of his life, H.G. Wells fell in love at least three times - once with the much younger Baroness Budberg,...

Although before him Charles Perrault in France and the Brothers Gimm in Germany had collected and retold folk-tales in ways which found wide popular audiences, it was only with the...

This biography of Sir Angus Wilson by Margaret Drabble, herself much influenced by his writing, traces his early years as a librarian at the British Library, interrupted by a grim...

A New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson, the acclaimed author of Red at the Bone, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse....

Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite 'hero-criminal', talented Tom Ripley. In this revolutionary...

This biography offers an insight into the intellectual and sexual life of Anais Nin. It includes material drawn from unpublished archives and diary pages and shows how through her lifelong...

Captivated is a true story of genius and possession. The background is the turn of the century, when a late 19th century world of mesmerists, psychics, trancers and table-turners gave...

Anais Nin (1903-1977) was the ultimate femme fatale, world-famous for her sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bigamous marriages. In the 1920s...

From its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing", to the last, "I am haunted by waters", A River Runs Through...

Charles Baudelaire has been the subject of myth, anecdote and scandal. A rebel, political agitator, dandy and post-romantic debauchee, his was the most original poetic imagination since the Renaissance. This...

** Shortlisted for the @CrimeFest H.R.F. Keating Award **'A smart and highly entertaining portrait of a literary powerhouse'- THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR'A riveting portrait' - GUARDIAN BOOKS OF...