Iain Sinclair – författare

Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire is Iain Sinclair's foray into one of London's most fascinating boroughs'As detailed and as complex as a historical map, taking the reader hither and thither with no care as to which might be the most direct route'ObserverHackney, That Rose-Red Empire is Iain Sinclair's personal record of his north-east London home in which he has lived for forty years. It is a documentary fiction, seeking to capture the spirit of place, before Hackney succumbs to mendacious green papers, eco boasts, sponsored public art and the Olympic Park gnawing at its edges. It is a message in a bottle, chucked into the flood of the future.'An explosion of literary fireworks'Peter Ackroyd, The Times'Gloriously sprawling, wonderfully congested, one of the finest books about London in recent decades'Daily Telegraph'Sinclair adopts the roles of pedestrian, pilgrim and poet, magnificently illuminating the borough's historical and spiritual life'The Times'Remarkable, compelling, bristles with unexpected, frequently lurid life. On Sinclair's territory there's nobody to touch him . . . a gonzo Samuel Pepys'Sunday TimesIain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

In Edge of the Orison the visionary Iain Sinclair walks in the steps of poet John Clare.In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead ... In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.'Brilliant . . . amusing, alarming and poignant. An elegy for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent and urgent' Robert Macfarlane, Times Literary Supplement'A sensitive,beautifully rendered portrait . . . a feast, a riddle, a slowly unravelling conundrum . . . a love-letter to British Romanticism' Independent'Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psychogeographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plain' J. G. Ballard, ObserverIain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

London Orbital is Iain Sinclair's exceptional voyage of discovery into the unloved outskirts of the city'My book of the year. Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English' John Lanchester, Daily TelegraphEncircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before.'A magnum opus, my book of the year. I urge you to read it. In fact, if you're a Londoner and haven't read it by the end of next year, I suggest you leave' Will Self, Evening Standard'A journey into the heart of darkness and a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose. I'm sure it will be read fifty years from now' J. G. Ballard, Observer

Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair's sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environsAndrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest - for both writer and reader.'Exhilarating, wonderfully funny, greatly unsettling - Sinclair on top form' Daily Telegraph'Prose of almost incantatory power, cut with Chandleresque pithiness' Sunday Times'Spectacular: the work of a man with the power to see things as they are, and magnify that vision with a clarity that is at once hallucinatory and forensic' Independent on SundayIain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

A novel about London -- its past, its people, its underbelly and its madness."In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history" GUARDIAN

Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair.WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZEThe Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent lowlife, broken criminals and reborn lunatics picks over the rivers detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction . . .'Remarkable: part apocalyptic documentary, part moth-eaten ghost story, part detective story. Inventive and stylish, Sinclair is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists' Sunday Times'One of those idiosyncratic literary texts that revivify the language, so darn quotable as to be the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare' Guardian'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' Angela CarterIain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

Iain Sinclair explores modern London through a day's hike around the London Overground route.The completion of the full circle of London Overground provides Iain Sinclair with a new path to walk the shifting territory of the capital. With thirty-three stations and thirty-five miles to tramp - plus inevitable and unforeseen detours and false steps - he embarks on a marathon circumnavigation at street level, tracking the necklace of garages, fish farms, bakeries, convenience cafés, cycle repair shops and Minder lock-ups which enclose inner London. 'He is incapable of writing a dull paragraph' Scotland on Sunday'Sinclair breathes wondrous life into monstrous man-made landscapes' Times Literary Supplement'If you are drawn to English that doesn't just sing, but sings the blues and does scat and rocks the joint, try Sinclair. His sentences deliver a rush like no one else's' Washington Post

A splendid – and necessary – publication…a great resourceIain SinclairCharles Booth’s landmark survey of life in late-19th-century London, published for the first time in one volume. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth's landmark social and economic survey found that 35 percent of Londoners were living in abject poverty. Booth's team of social investigators interviewed Londoners from all walks of life, recording their comments, together with their own unrestrained remarks and statistical information, in 450 notebooks. Their findings formed the basis of Booth's colour-coded social mapping (from vicious and semi-criminal to wealthy) and his seventeen-volume survey Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, 1886-1903.Organized into six geographical sections, Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps presents the hand-colored preparatory and printed social mapping of London. Accompanying the maps are reproductions of pages from the original notebooks, containing anecdotes and observations too judgmental for Booth to include in his final published survey. An introduction by professor Mary S. Morgan clarifies the aims and methodology of Booth's survey and six themed essays contextualize the the survey's findings, accompanied by evocative period photographs. Providing insights into the minutia of everyday life viewed through the lens of inhabitants of every trade, class, creed, and nationality, Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps brings to life the diversity and dynamism of late nineteenth-century London.

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in Crash?In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. If Cronenberg's 'adapted' Crash, he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?

A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2021‘Follow Iain Sinclair into the cloud jungles of Peru and emerge questioning all that seemed so solid and immutable.’ Barry MilesFrom the award-winning author of The Last London and Lights Out for the Territory, a journey in the footsteps of our ancestors.Iain Sinclair and his daughter travel through Peru, guided by – and in reaction to – an ill-fated colonial expedition led by his great-grandfather. The family history of a displaced Scottish highlander fades into the brutal reality of a major land grab. The historic thirst for gold and the establishment of sprawling coffee plantations leave terrible wounds on virgin territory.In Sinclair’s haunting prose, no place escapes its past, and nor can we.‘The Gold Machine is a trip, a psychoactive expedition in compelling company.’ TLS

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Lud Heat gathered in a single volumeFrom the singular imagination of Iain Sinclair—poet, novelist, and cartographer of London’s haunted geographies—comes The Darkling Trilogy, uniting two of his most influential works for the first time in a single North American edition.White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings excavates the mythos of Jack the Ripper and Victorian London, interweaving true crime, literary obsession, and occult speculation into a hallucinatory investigation of violence and memory.Lud Heat captures the pulse of London as a visionary landscape, charting the city’s architecture, ley lines, and buried histories in a fevered mix of poetry, reportage, and esoteric speculation.Together, these books form a darkly luminous map of a city—and a culture—in collapse and rebirth. By turns savage, satirical, and visionary, The Darkling Trilogy stands as a cornerstone of Sinclair’s work and a landmark in contemporary British literature. Long unavailable in North America, this volume restores two masterpieces to print for a new generation of readers seeking the feverish borderland where history, myth, and psychogeography converge.

In Pariah Genius, literary giant Iain Sinclair follows in the footsteps of photographer John Deakin, whose chronicles of Soho life - and the world of Francis Bacon and his friends - have so influenced our perception of that generation's work.In this bold fictionalisation, Sinclair enters the underworld of Deakin's life and imagination, pursuing his subject across continents, in dive bars, and bedrooms. The result is an engrossing, utterly unique portrait of a man who some felt was a fallen angel, and others, the devil himself.

The definitive showcase of the year’s finest British short stories‘Bravo to Salt’s beacon of delight and intrigue – its annual collection of the UK’s best short stories, from established and emerging voices.’ —Duncan MinshullNow relaunched for a new era, Best British Short Stories returns with a bold new look and a renewed commitment to celebrating the art of the short story. As we enter our fifteenth volume, this much-loved annual collection continues to be the go-to anthology for readers seeking the most exciting and diverse voices in contemporary British fiction.Assembled by series editor Nicholas Royle, Best British Short Stories 2025 presents a stellar selection of stories first published in 2024, drawn from magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks, and online. Whether you’re a devoted follower or discovering the series for the first time, this new edition reaffirms our mission to champion storytelling in all its forms.‘If the latest iteration of Salt’s Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.’ —Lawrence Foley, TLSFeaturing stories by: David Bevan, Rose Biggin, Christopher Burns, Ian Critchley, Pippa Goldschmidt, Linden Hibbert, Hannah Hoare, Catrin Kean, Roger Luckhurst, Baret Magarian, Wyl Menmuir, Alison Moore, Okechukwu Nzelu, Simon Okotie, Imogen Reid, C. D. Rose, Iain Sinclair, Elizabeth Stott, Mark Valentine, and Naomi Wood.

A New Statesman Book of the YearLondon. A city apart. Inimitable. Or so it once seemed.Spiralling from the outer limits of the Overground to the pinnacle of the Shard, Iain Sinclair encounters a metropolis stretched beyond recognition. The vestiges of secret tunnels, the ghosts of saints and lost poets lie buried by developments, the cycling revolution and Brexit. An electrifying final odyssey, The Last London is an unforgettable vision of the Big Smoke before it disappears into the air of memory.

'A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving ... at once disorientating and illuminating.' - Robert MacfarlaneWe shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories.In Living With Buildings, Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. A father and his daughter, who has a rare syndrome, visit the estate where they once lived. Developers clink champagne glasses as residents are 'decanted' from their homes. A box sculpted from whalebone, thought to contain healing properties, is returned to its origins with unexpected consequences. Part investigation, part travelogue, Living With Buildings brings the spaces we inhabit to life as never before.

Rodinsky's world was that of the East European Jewry, cabbalistic speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss. He touched the imagination of artist Rachel Lichtenstein, whose grandparents had left Poland in the 1930s. This text weaves together Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky - which took her to Poland, to Israel and around Jewish London - with Iain Sinclair's meditations on her journey into her own past and on the Whitechapel he has reinvented in his own writing. Rodinsky's Room is a testament to a world that has all but vanished, a homage to a unique culture and way of life.

Iain Sinclair's classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic 'heat' as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book's many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the 'psychogeographical' tone for much of Sinclair's mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore's From Hell.

This classic text has in recent times been fused to its contemporaneous volume, Lud Heat, but very much deserves to stand on its own. Suicide Bridge was originally published by Albion Village Press in 1979 with the sub-title A Book of the Furies, A Mythology of the South & East - Autumn 1973 to Spring 1978. As elsewhere, Sinclair saunters into the shadowy city underworld with his ever-watchful eye and roving syntax, this time probing the mythic figures from William Blake's Jerusalem and the mythical king Bladud. Previously text-bound entities such as Hand, Hyle and Kotope are made flesh and and given to foggy breath in the contemporary landscape. Addressed to "the enemy" the reader is precariously perched on the teetering bridge while the author kicks at the mythic spindles that hold it up. Sinclair's alternating, inter-penetrating prose and poetry become the uneven struts and pylons of a new concrete/abstract literary edifice. - 'One of the cliffs of Blake's and Coleridge's Albion sweeping against the walls of Everywhere...This is the landscape of another realm. We are walking over a raw and smoking surface filled with surprises.All around are the possibilities of lost tribes quietly bustling in the shadows...This is a rare jewel.' - Michael McClure

Iain Sinclair, the celebrated author and psycho-geographer, walks back along the blue-grey roads and cliff-top paths of his childhood in south Wales, rediscovering the Gower peninsula. Provoked by the strange and enigmatic series of paintings Afal du Brogwyr (Black Apple of Gower) made by the artist Ceri Richards in the 1950s, Sinclair leaves behind the familiar "murky elsewheres" of his life in Hackney, London, carrying an envelope of photographs and old postcards, along with fragments of memory. He soon realises that a series of walks over the same ground - Port Enyon Point to Worm's Head have become significant waymarks in his life. His recollections of a meeting with the poet Vernon Watkins, the art of Richards and the poetry of Dylan Thomas lead him to his final quest, the Paviland Cave where in 1823 human remains 36,000 years old were discovered.

In Pariah Genius, literary giant Iain Sinclair follows in the footsteps of photographer John Deakin, whose chronicles of Soho life - and the world of Francis Bacon and his friends - have so influenced our perception of that generation's work. In this bold fictionalisation, Sinclair enters the underworld of Deakin's life and imagination, pursuing his subject across continents, in dive bars, and bedrooms. The result is an engrossing, utterly unique portrait of a man who some felt was a fallen angel, and others, the devil himself.