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Threads
Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by th...
The Three of Us
Winner of the J. R. Ackerley Award This is the story of three people: Julia Blackburn, her father Thomas and her mother Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic, who for many years was addicted to barbiturates; Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious. After her parents were divorced, Julia's mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each should become her lover. When one of the lodgers started an affair with Julia, Rosalie was devastated; when he later committed suicide the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocably. Or so it seemed until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukaemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life.
Time Song
Shortly after her husband’s death, Julia Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the vast once-populated stretch of land that connected Great Britain to Continental Europe thousands of years ago but is now under the North Sea. She felt driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there as revealed through artifacts and the fossil record. In Time Song, she brings us along on her journey, introducing us to the paleontologists, archaeologists, fishermen, and fellow Doggerland enthusiasts she meets along the way. What emerges is a lyrical exploration—part travelogue and part history—and a profound meditation on time and the immensity of the past.
With Billie
'This is a raw, true book that evokes not just the life of the great singer Billie Holiday but an entire jazz era....' Mail on Sunday Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting book is a life of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz. These same recordings have been used as the basis for the 2020 film, Billie. Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim...
Old Man Goya
In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion, and Goya transformed what he saw around him into visionary paintings, drawings, and etchings. These were also years of tenderness for Goya, of intimate relationships with the Duchess of Alba and with Leocadia, his mistress, who accompanied him to the end. Blackburn’s singular distinction as a biographer is her uncanny ability to create a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation—to think herself into another world. In Goya she has found the perfect subject. Visiting the towns Goya frequented, reading the revelatory letters that he wrote for years to a boyhood friend, investigating the subjects he portrayed, Julia Blackburn writes about the elderly painter with the intimacy of an old friend, seeing through his eyes and sharing the silence in his head. With unprecedented immediacy and illumination, Old Man Goya gives us an unparalleled portrait of the artist.
Thin Paths
In 1994, while walking the Alta Via, the high path winding from the French border to the Bay of Lerici, a man stopped in a remote village, and found he couldn't forget it. Julia Blackburn married that man and moved to that house in 1999. What she found in the mountains was a new way of life, and one that is fast disappearing.
Daisy Bates in the Desert
In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this "eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman" (New York Times Book Review) tells a fascinating, true story in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Barry Lopez.
Dreaming the Karoo
A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The res...
The Emperor's Last Island
In 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on St. Helena for a surreal exile that would last until his death six years later. • "Dazzling... a compelling meditation on Napoleon's exile...Blackburn has brought her startlingly imaginative sensitivity to bear on a vanished time."—The New York Times Book Review “A resonant meditation on exile, fame, the stories we tell about ourselves (and) the bigger stories we tell about our great figures.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
Charles Waterton
Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. During his lifetime he was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals and birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians and a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Dickens, Darwin and Roosevelt. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccenticities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas and work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.
