Artists, Writers & Cultural Biography Books

Oscar Wilde once wrote “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This book is your opportunity to discover a compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and …

The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small ThingsTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR NONF…

Click to enlarge The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath (Author) Format: Paperback / softback   848 pages Publisher:Faber & Faber Imprint:Faber & Faber Edition:Main ISBN:9780571377657 Publishe…

These six extraordinary women shared Pablo Picasso's life and were instrumental in his career, yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses. Hidden Portraits reveals that their lives were - without exception…

Father's Day, 2005. Just after nightfall, a discarded husband was driving his three young sons back to their mother's house. On that dark country road, barely five minutes from home, the old white car swerved off the highway and p…

Upon its original publication in 1996, Are You Somebody? quickly became an cultural sensation in Ireland, sparking an ‘emotional episode in public life in Ireland’. O’Faolain’s striking candour and focus on the long-silenced exper…

Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. He was in some ways a very ordinary man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels and his local church.Yet as Sa…

Bill Bryson’s biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over…

From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Several …

The joy that permeates Renoir’s paintings emerged from the heart of a deeply complex man. Even his close friends and family members were baffled by the contradictions that defined him.In Renoir: An Intimate Biography, Barbara Ehrl…

‘For me,’ wrote James Baldwin in 1959, ‘the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject – his key and ours to his achievement.’Baldwin: A Love Story…

Joe Tucker's Uncle Eric was a beloved yet unconventional figure throughout his life.A shambolically dressed man who lived with his mother for almost eighty years, he appeared to exist only for daily trips to the bookie - and yet h…

The story of the twentieth-century avant-garde is a story of resistance, of the outsider, of strangeness, of individual freedom, of rejecting the ordinary and overcoming marginalisation through self-invention. It is also a story t…

During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair…

In this new anthology of essays about Maeve Brennan, ten contemporary Irish writers consider the various meanings of the word ‘asylum’: an institution, a site of incarceration, a refuge and a shelter. They explore cityscapes and g…

In this perceptive essay collection, Orwell recounts a pivotal moment in his career as a police officer in Burma. He shares his experience of being treated for pneumonia in a Parisian hospital for the poor, and divulges into the a…

‘This is not a war … it is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ In this personal account of his time fighting for the POUM militia of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell details his life in the tren…

‘The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.’ In George Orwell’s first full-length work, a memoir in two parts, he recounts how he lived in two major cities as a struggling writer with very little money in …

A recently discovered journal from one of America's most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a…

Follow the journey of David Hockney's exceptional life in a unique graphic novel format. From his childhood in Bradford and early years making it as an artist, to his sun-drenched Los Angeles period, his triumphal return to the UK…

The great Australian writer's masterpiece'THE TIMESHelen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she…

The definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, including unpublished and never-before-seen material, with an Introduction by Patrick Radden Keefe. Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many peop…

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and …

Embark on an extraordinary journey through the life, music and spiritual adventures of Yusuf/Cat Stevens, one of the iconic figures of our time. CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT is more than a memoir - it's a profound exploration of ide…

For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vie…

A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many thin…

Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her m…

Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig...Cavorting naked through the Warwickshire countryside painted green...Acting opposite a child with a pumpkin on his head...These are just a few of the things Dame Judi Dench has …

“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” The secon…

Samuel Beckett was perhaps the most unconventional playwright of the twentieth century. His plays broke all the rules by dispensing with traditional concepts of plot, scene, and character, concentrating instead on the experience o…