Calling All Members,
We are back! Our second week of isolation and lockdown gives a marvellous opportunity for us all to pause and think.
This week The Biographers’ Club is inviting members to contribute reflections, diaries or pieces of memoir prompted by the extraordinary times we are living through.. We will post these on the website, and your writing will form a unique and wonderful archive of this terrible time.
The pieces should be short – no more that 300 words. Please email us your work to, [email protected]
Biographers’ Book of the week
Each week a member from the committee we will be picking a Biography that is well worth a read, and if you have a Biography you would like to recommend then please do email us and we can feature it as next week’s biography of the week.
This week Committee Member Sarah Anderson, picked The Return by Hisham Matar, which won The Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography in 2016.
What is it about?
The Return is the account of Matar’s return to Libya in 2012 in search of his father who had been abducted from Egypt in 1990 by Qaddafi’s henchmen, and sent to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, where he was tortured and very probably killed. The descriptions of how it feels to be an exile and the ‘survivor’s guilt’ that accompanies a life in exile, is written about both movingly and grippingly. Is the hope that his father might have survived the massacre (there was a possible sighting in 2002) better than the certainty that he was dead? He writes that to be a Libyan is to live with questions, mostly unanswered, but that need and uncertainty are excellent teachers and that although his family was torn apart by the events, it ultimately made them stronger. His descriptions of pain are unflinching and yet this testament to his father and to his country proves the importance of memories: once someone has entered your heart they are always with you. His uncle Mahmoud, also jailed, always kept a place in his mind where he could love and forgive.
Matar experiences the world in words and images and spends many hours looking at paintings, indeed he looks at one painting for many months. This led him to go to Siena, the subject of his latest book a Month in Siena-– (Penguin. £12.99). Two very different books – but both are extraordinary and highly recommended. (The Return, Penguin, £9.99)
If you have read this book and would like to review it, we can publish your thoughts in next week’s newsletter, and we would love to hear from you. [email protected]
The Biographers’ Club News
Self isolation has lead to an increase of book buying online
People in the UK were stockpiling novels and home learning books last week as they prepared for a spell in isolation, sales figures suggest.
Readers are turning online, with Waterstones seeing its online sales rise by 400% week on week.
Sales of fiction rose by a third, while children’s education went up 234% to the third highest level on record.
However the book shops are suffering, as key book shops have closed their doors.
The Controversial Woody Allen memoir has been published
Apropos of Nothing was printed by Arcade Publishing in the US.
The previous publisher, Hachette, scrapped plans to release the book after protests from its staff and his children Ronan and Dylan Farrow.
Dylan has accused Allen of sexually abusing her in 1992 when she was seven years old. He denies the claim, calling it a “total fabrication” in his book.
Allen is an Oscar-winning director who has written and directed cult classics including Annie Hall and Manhattan.
The 84-year-old lost a four-film deal with Amazon last November.
Each week we will try our best to bring a snippet of news from the world of Biography, if you have any news that you would like to share then please do get in touch
We will be back next Monday, have a lovely week.
All best wishes,
The Biographers’ Club