Ian sansom books in order

Ian sansom county guides
Ian sansom wife
Ian sansom goodreads

•

Jay Parini

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H Auden. It’s a poem I’ve read many times over the past forty years or so. Like Sansom, I’ve loved it dearly, been baffled by it, been inspired and annoyed, wished it were different, envied its perfections, sniffed at its imperfections and been generally grateful for the brilliance of the man who created it.

This book is not literary criticism, so don’t enter these gates with your head bowed. In fact, there has been very little real literary criticism since Erich Auerbach published Mimesis in 1946, which Sansom rightly calls ‘one of the last great, readable works of literary criticism’. The university presses continue to publish monographs that purport to tell us something about literature, but it’s generally a depressing spectacle. On poetry, it’s usually the poets who have something to say: Pound or Eliot, Winters or Jarrell, Brodsky or Heaney.

Auden has, more than mo

•

Published recently:

Reading Room: A Year of Literary Curiosities is a playful and provocative collection of 365 extracts sourced from the British Library's collections, encompassing a wide range of great works in literature, poetry, essays and letters, historical and scientific treatises along with a myriad of eclectic imagery. With 120 colour illustrations.

September 1, 1939 is about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

This is a book about a poet – W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

About a poem – ‘September 1, 1939’, his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed – or been condemned – to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.

About a cit

•

Ian Sansom

Ian Sansom regularly contributes to the Guardian, the London Review of Books and Poetry Review. He lives with his family in Northern Ireland. His first book The Truth About Babies was published by Granta in 2002, and his first novel Ring Road was published by Fourth Estate in the UK and US.

The Case of the Missing Books was published by Fourth Estate in 2006, the first of Ian’s current Mobile Library series of comic novels set in Northern Ireland. Mr Dixon Dissapears was published later in 2006; The Delegate's Choice in January 2008 and The Bad Book Affair in August 2008.

Ian is writing a new series, also for Fourth Estate, The County Guides. The first instalment, The Norfolk Mystery, was chosen for Waterstones Summer Book Club. The second book in the series, Death in Devon, was published in 2015, followed by Westmorland Alone in 2016 and Essex Poison in 2017 and The Sussex Murder in 2019. In 2019 Ian published also September 1st, 1939, a biography of the poem by W. H. Auden (HarperCollins).