About
Collected here are the books I have published over the years, four novels and seven works of non-fiction. A handful of other books and projects have never taken flight, among them Bad Flowers, my homage to Baudelaire and anti-horticulture (for a time I was labelled a historian of flowers), and a novel that took me to the Slovakian castles of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, so hauntingly reimagined by the French surrealist, Valentine Penrose.
A feeling for place is the thread that binds all my books together, from the tropical forests of Martinique in my first novel, The Taking of Agnès, to the marshlands of coastal Suffolk in The Angel Cantata and the atmospheric ruins of Jamestown Island, Virginia, where English settlers first put down permanent roots on North American soil. The Lakeland of my new book — Looking for Mr Schwitters — is no exception.
You will also find an author’s biography and details of my mentoring work with young academics and doctoral researchers.
Looking for Mr Schwitters
After a long search, Looking for Mr Schwitters has found the perfect publisher in Little Toller Books, renowned for publishing books that celebrate the natural world and the places in which we live. They have done a beautiful job, and reviews so far have been heartening.
Writing in the Spectator, art critic Andrew Lambirth called it ‘an evocative love letter to Lakeland’ and concluded his review: ‘One of the enduring purposes of art is to make sense of life. This intriguing book does just that.’
https://spectator.com/article/witty-lyrical-and-abstract-the-art-of-kurt-schwitters/
