SARAH BAKEWELL
Welcome to my website, a place where you can read about Michel de Montaigne, about forgers and revolutionaries, about mummy medicine, the electrical resurrection of the dead, primordial slime, writing courses, and more.
Also ... click on the BIRD to follow my tweets, and the LOG to follow my blog.
News
How to Live won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction in the U.K. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2010, and the Marsh Biography Award. It is now available in paperback in both U.S. and U.K. editions - click the links above right to buy these from Amazon.
The Italian edition of How to Live was published in June 2011 - Montaigne: l'arte di vivere (Fazi Editore).
The Spanish edition of How to Live was published in September 2011 - Como vivir: una vida con Montaigne (Ariel).
Click here for a video interview with Corriere della Sera - in English with Italian subtitles.
And here for an audio interview with Philosophy Bites, the philosophy website.
About my books
How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer is an unorthodox biography of the sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne, one of the most humane and likeable writers who ever lived. Read more!
My first two books explored the lives of extraordinary but little-known people from history. The Smart is a courtroom drama, revolving around the eighteenth-century courtesan and swindler Margaret Caroline Rudd. The English Dane is a biography of nineteenth-century explorer, revolutionary and spy Jorgen Jorgenson. Click on the links to find out more about these, and to try an excerpt from each work.
For information on translation and other rights, please contact my agent, Rogers, Coleridge & White.
About me
I came to writing via a long route which began with being born in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, and almost immediately being taken travelling all over the world by my parents. They used to bundle me into a well-padded drawer and load me into the back seat of the car, then head off to Switzerland or Russia. Each evening, they took the drawer out and carried it up to the hotel bedroom, and the next morning they carried it down again. This has left me with an attitude to life that can best be described as cheerful resignation combined with a desire to think outside the box.
Eventually we emigrated to Australia, and much of my childhood was spent living a few minutes from the beach in Sydney. We then returned to Europe, backpacking through the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia. After fitful attendance at various schools, I studied philosophy at the University of Essex.
I became enthralled by the work of Martin Heidegger and started a PhD on him, but the spell wore off as quickly as it had been cast, and I dropped out to move to London and work in a tea-bag factory.
My job was to catch boxes of tea-bags spat at me by a machine, flip them on their sides, and push them in groups of six to the next person on the line. It was only for the first two hours that machine spat faster than I could flip, but they were the most memorable two hours of my life.
After this, I worked in bookshops for several years, did a postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence, and wrote fiction in my spare time, before landing a job at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. There, I spent ten fascinating years as a cataloguer and curator of early printed books. It was while cataloguing that collection that I came across the tales that started me off as a non-fiction writer: odd medical cases, and a mysterious, angry pamphlet by a “Mrs Stewart”, which became the seed of my book The Smart.
Since 2002, my main job has been writing. I also teach writing courses in both fiction and non-fiction, curate occasional exhibitions, and catalogue old books for the National Trust. For more on the courses, for a virtual tour of the exhibition Metamorphing, and for some of my articles, please cruise the links.
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Fortean Times/Alex Howe
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You can also get to my old (pre-September 2009) blog directly by clicking here .