SINCLAIR, Iain
Iain Sinclair is the author of many books including Lud Heat (1975) ; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) ; Downriver (1991, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Radon Daughters (1994) ; Lights Out for the Territory (1997) ; Rodinsky’s Room (1999 with Rachel Lichtenstein); Landor’s Tower (2001) ; London Orbital (2003) ; Dining on Stones (2005) ; and Edge of the Orison (2006). His latest book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire was published by Hamish Hamilton in February 2009.
He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances (2006). He lives in Hackney.
“It isn’t often that one reads a book and is convinced that it’s an instant classic, but I’m sure that LONDON ORBITAL will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair’s Britain. It’s a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair’s vivid prose, and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres” — J. G. Ballard, Observer
“Sinclair’s dark, psychogeographical exhumations of London scribe a semi-mythical underbelly of malcontents, manic bibliophiles and losers. Subterranean pubs and their snugs, hospitals and their labyrinths, all those who lose their way in a metropolis–Sinclair’s subject is situated lives. How is a city separate from the people who make up its noise, its madness, its lies and its past? This is a harsh poetry. As a novelist Sinclair marks out a unique space. He understands place as a way time positions its memory of itself in the bricks and bridges of where we drink and fight. He shows how history’s narrative saturates the present with awful resonances. London has a degraded beauty in each ancient street, each crime, each failure. Sinclair’s impressionistic, dense wordcraft, often difficult, arcane, is lambent with regard to the spectral dusk of every city’s shadows. White Chappell Scarlet Tracings is a paean to worlds we all do best skirting.” — Mark Thwaitem, Amazon on White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.