Ian Patterson is a widely published poet and translator, and a former academic. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo's Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski. He worked in Further Education between 1970 and 1984, had a second-hand bookselling business for ten years after that, and from 1995 until 2018 was an academic, teaching English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Many of his students have gone on to shape the world of publishing and writing, both in the UK and the US.

What a magnificent achievement Books: A Manifesto is. Now more than ever we need the companionship of the printed page and the rough, smooth, dark, light, troubling and sublime magic that books alone can weave. Despite his formidable academic and poetic standing, Ian Patterson has written this for everyone. There is no snobbery or scholastic grandiosity here. He's as good on Enid Blyton, Jilly Cooper and Agatha Christie as on William Blake, Hardy and Proust. A lifetime of lively and open reading distilled into a marvellous and timely apologia for buying, loving, collecting, cradling, cooing over - and of course reading - books, books of every imaginable kind. Hugely recommended