Paul Scraton – författare

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand.The stories of Berlin are the stories BUILT ON SAND. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. BUILT ON SAND centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. This novel offers a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.

In the Pines is author Paul Scraton's story of an unnamed narrator's lifelong relationship with the forest and the mysteries it contains, told through fragmented stories that capture the blurred details and sharp focus of memory.Accompanied by eerie images created using a 170-year-old technique of collodion wet plate photography by Eymelt Sehmer, In the Pines is a powerfully evocative collaboration between image and text

It is a story about journeys. The two strands of the narrative are Ben travelling from London to a small German island to see his friend Pascal, who is in his last days of his life. As he travels, he listens to voice notes from Pascal, each relating to a photograph from a different moment in his life.