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| Curriculum Vitae: available for £7.20 from www.carcanet.co.uk |
Curriculum Vitae, the autobiography of the great 20th century novelist and poet Muriel Spark, will feature on next week's A Good Read on BBC Radio 4. The programme will be broadcast at 4:30pm on Tuesday 26 June, and will be available online in perpetuity.
Cast in the dye of Edinburgh’s caustic morality, Ms Spark emerges as one of her own best characters.
-- Clare Boylan, Irish Times
Harriett Gilbert and her guests will discuss their three book recommendations: Constance Briscoe, writer and part-time judge, champions Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton-Walsh; science writer Angela Seini chooses Foundation by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov; and Harriett's own choice is Muriel Spark's autobiography.
'Who are you, darling?' he said.
I thought it a very good question, and still do. I resolved, all those years ago, to write an autobiography which would help to explain, to myself and others: Who am I.
I thought it a very good question, and still do. I resolved, all those years ago, to write an autobiography which would help to explain, to myself and others: Who am I.
Curriculum Vitae
Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. ‘In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,’ Spark says.
In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the ‘girls of slender means’, editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.
All the Poems
Muriel Spark was a poet before she was a novelist: All the Poems presents the full range of the poetry of one of the most acclaimed modern British writers. Here are villanelles, ballads and epigrams, as well as freer forms, all marked by brilliantly precise observation and command of her medium. Her poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark music beneath the mundane. The edge of danger and wry insights in Muriel Spark's poems are equally unforgettable."Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write poetic prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet. Whether in prose or verse, all creative writing is mysteriously connected with music and I always hope this factor is apparent throughout my work." - Muriel Spark
Photograph of Muriel Spark Copyright © Jerry Bauer.