David Constantine – författare

Named to Kirkus Reviews'' Best Story Collections of 2015

Featuring the story adapted into the Academy Award nominated film, 45 YEARS

"I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started re-reading them again and again. They are gripping tales, but what is startling is the quality of the writing. Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be."—A.S. Byatt, The Guardian

"Rich and allusive and unashamedly moving."—The Independent

"Spellbinding."—The Irish Times

"An uneasy blend of the exquisite and the everyday . . . the beatific, the ordinary, the rebarbative even, are almost indistinguishable . . . intelligent and well-turned."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form."—The Reader

The first American publication by one of the greatest living fiction masters, In Another Country spans David Constantine''s remarkable thirty-year career. Known for their pristine emotional clarity, their spare but intensely evocative dialogue, and their fearless exposures of the heart in moments of defiance, change, resistance, flight, isolation, and redemption, these stories demonstrate again and again Constantine''s timeless and enduring appeal.

David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet, and translator. His collections of poetry include The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Nine Fathom Deep, and Elder. He is the author of one novel, Davies, and has published four collections of short stories in the United Kingdom, including the winner of the 2013 Frank O''Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. He lives in Oxford, where, until 2012, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

A New York Times Notable Book 2016

An October Indie Next List “Great Reads” Pick

After the death of her beloved husband, Katrin, a literary biographer, picks her way through a trove of his letters and postcards, slowly piecing together the entirety of his life. Surprised by an unlikely chapter in his past that was never revealed during their marriage, Katrin sets off on a heartbreaking journey to discover the man she never fully knew.

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine’s poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. The title of his eleventh collection, Belongings, signals that these are poems concerned both with our possessions and with what possesses us. Among much else in the word belongings, the poems draw on a sense of our ‘co-ordinates’ – something like the eastings and northings that give a map-reference – how you might triangulate a life. The poems ask: Where do you belong? And have in mind also the hostile: You don’t belong here. Go back where you belong. Many, possibly all, the poems in the collection touch more or less closely on such matters. Perhaps all poetry does, showing a life in its good or bad defining circumstances. In the poem ‘Red’, the defining geography is literal, drawn from an old geological map of Manchester in which Constantine finds ‘the locus itself, a railway cutting / Behind the hospital I was born in’, from which the paths of a life led outward. In other poems the particular becomes universal, a territory holding all our belongings, our memories of the people and the places we hold in our hearts. Behind these explorations another kind of belonging is challenged: our relationship with the planet to which we belong, but which does not belong to us.

In A Bird Called Elaeus, poet and translator David Constantine presents a selection of poems from The Greek Anthology, a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by around 300 authors.

The Greek Anthology is a marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine. For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. Through his translations, Constantine brings already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction. For the Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws. These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it’s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty.