Seán O'Hagan – författare

THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARA DAILY TELEGRAPH BEST MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARA TELEGRAPH BEST MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEARFaith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave's inner life.Created from over forty hours of intimate conversations with Seán O'Hagan, it is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave's own words, of what really drives his life and creativity.The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave's life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years.From a place of considered reflection, Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true creative visionary.

Published in 2006 following Damien Hirst's first major print exhibition at the Paul Stolper Gallery in London in 2005, New Religion explores Hirst's central themes: ''I was thinking that there are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science... Of them all, science seems to be the right one now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end.'' With full-color reproductions of this entire series of Hirst silkscreen prints produced for the New Religion exhibition, such as "The Apostles," "The Wound of Christ," "The Last Supper" and "The Stations of the Cross," as well as editioned sculptures and multiples such as "The Fate of Man" and the 'box/cabinet' called "New Religion," this hardback publication is a modern day biblical picture-book exploring combinations between science and religion. And the ideas about Hirst's science/religion dichotomy are further explored through an intriguing interview with Sean O'Hagan that moves effortlessly from the macro to the micro, and back again, ''I just can't help thinking that science is the new religion for many people. It's as simple and as complicated as that really.''

Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews’s record of her journey through the beguiling Caspian region, considering its people and geography. Between 2010 and 2015, Dewe Mathews visited the five countries that surround the Caspian Sea: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Southern Russia, and Northern Iran. There, far from the arena of global politics, Dewe Mathews found that materials like oil, salt, and water are involved in the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. Divided into three distinct chapters—“Oil, Gas, Fire,” “Rock, Salt, Uranium,” and “Water”— Caspian: The Elements is composed of a series of visual stories exploring the ways in which humans are inextricably linked to this enigmatic and much-coveted landscape.