THE INVENTION OF ANGELA CARTER

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THE INVENTION OF ANGELA CARTER:

A Biography by Edmund Gordon

says Norman Warwick

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important English writers of the last century, Angela Carter’s work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range.

Her life was as vigorously modern and unconventional as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself – as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer – and how she came to write such seductive and distinctive masterworks as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children. Because its subject so powerfully embodied the spirit of the times, the book also provides a fresh perspective on Britain’s social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines such topics as the 1960s counterculture, the social and imaginative conditions of the nuclear age, and the advent of second wave feminism

Author Edmund Gordon has followed in Angela Carter’s footsteps – travelling to the places she lived in Britain, Japan, and the USA – to uncover a life rich in adventure and incident. With unrestricted access to her manuscripts, letters, and journals, and informed by interviews with Carter’s friends and family, Gordon offers an unrivalled portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most dazzlingly original writers.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Literary Review (UK)

we´re gonna need a bigger bookshelf

Edmund Gordon is an award-winning writer and critic, and Reader in Creative and Critical Writing at King’s College London.

His first book, The Invention of Angela Carter, was published in 2016. It won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Biographers’ Club/Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, was a finalist for the US National Book Critics Circle Award, and was selected as a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Spectator, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times.

 

Edmund’s essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including:-

Financial Times

Guardian,  Independent, 

London Review of Books, New Statesman, Observer, Spectator, Sunday Times

Times Literary Supplement.

He contributed to the BBC Two documentary Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women, and has appeared as a guest on Arts & Books (ABC Radio 1) and The Book Show (RTE Radio 1). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

He lives in London with his wife and three children.