Searching for Doggerland

Time Song

A journey told through stories and songs into Doggerland, the ancient region that once joined the east coast of England to Holland

A poetic and fascinating exploration of life on Doggerland...   This is one of the only books I've ever read that has made me feel better about climate change.

A magical, mesmerising book - a book which makes you feel giddy at the thought of the deep gulf of history hidden just beneath your feet.

Breathtaking... [a] splendidly rich book... I admire the intelligence, the appetite for discovery and the shining imagination that have gone into [Time Song].

Julia Blackburn's marvellous Time Song: Searching for Doggerland...is startling, funny and often very moving.

[Time Song] is time travel... wonderful.

Rarely have I read a book in which there is such an entrancingly liquid and easy drift between the metaphorical and the actual… This is not science or history (there are enough books like that) but understanding – so that in [Blackburn’s] hands the ancient Doggerland landscape of distant summers becomes filled again… This book is a wonder.

Time Song is not a straightforward book about Doggerland. It is much more interesting than that… Time Song is richly peopled, Blackburn’s unflagging curiosity and sharp eye bringing a diverse cast of characters vividly to life. She sifts their stories not just for information, but for meaning; she’s conjuring for us not merely the facts of Doggerland, but the weight of its omission from our history books, our collective memory and our imaginations.

One of my favourite writers in the whole world is Julia Blackburn and she has produced yet another uncategorisable masterpiece which is Time Song... [Blackburn] is one of our great original writers... [Time Song] is a beautiful, beautiful book.

There are many beauties to be found in Blackburn’s writing, particularly when she turns an observant eye on landscapes and the evidence they provide of the prehistoric peoples who inhabited them.

Majestic… The genius of Time Song is that the diverse form of the book subtly suggests that narratives may not be continuous… [this] book on the past is above all a response to the urgent problems of the present.

[Julia Blackburn] has an inimitable approach to non-fiction… down-to-earth – though always thought provoking… begging to be set to music.

There is something quite magical about this book. It is full of surprises, of twists and turns, changes of tone and focus. Blackburn casually compresses vast sweeps of geological time into a paragraph… She has a deceptively simple way of writing, almost childlike, never embellished, but behind it lies an artfulness that once sensed, is beautiful beyond words… absolutely delightful.

Julia Blackburn is an impossible-to-categorise writer, curious in every sense… and she has a genius for the imaginative leap, for thinking her way into the past.

It is in her descriptions of the sea and her imaginings of the land it submerged that Ms Blackburn's book is most arresting… the combination of wry observations and personal reflections makes Time Song gripping.

Time Song is fiendishly clever… Archaeologists have long known how past and present co-exist. None, however, has been able to express it so convincingly.

Julia Blackburn’s marvellous Time Song...is startling, funny and often very moving.

An engaging and informative link to deep history.

Dreamy, poetic, meditative, wildly discursive and intensely personal… [Blackburn] has a witchy way of ascribing human personality to other species, and even inanimate objects… Provocative and poetic.

Julia Blackburn’s books include The Emperor’s Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya, With Billie, The Three of Us, Thin Paths and Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, which won the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 and the New Angle Book Prize 2017. 
 
Enrique Brinkmann was born in Malaga in 1938. He is well-known for his paintings and his graphic work. He has three times been awarded Spain’s prestigious Premio Nacional de Grabado.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE AND THE HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 
 
A journey told through stories and songs into Doggerland, the ancient region that once joined the east coast of England to Holland 
 
Time Song tells of the creation, the existence and the loss of a country now called Doggerland, a huge and fertile area that once connected the entire east coast of England with mainland Europe, until it was finally submerged by rising sea levels around 5000 BC. 
 
Julia Blackburn mixes fragments from her own life with a series of eighteen 'songs' and all sorts of stories about the places and the people she meets in her quest to get closer to an understanding of this vanished land. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilised in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man who, despite having lain in a peat bog since the start of the Bronze Age, seems to be about to wake from a dream... 
 
'This book is a wonder' Adam Nicolson, Spectator 
 
'A clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past' Antony Gormley

The Delicate Life of John Craske

Threads

A beautifully illustrated account of the search for an undiscovered genius, the Norfolk fisherman who became an artist. 
 
Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 
Winner of the New Angle Book Prize 2017

Oh, what a miraculous book this is: parochial, weird and inconclusive in a way that few books dare to be these days, and illustrated so generously, with something beautiful or interesting on every other page. Buy it, and let it take you out to sea, no sou’wester required.

Wonderful… I lay down her book without knowing the cause of the “mental stupors” that defined Craske’s life, or understanding his relationship to his complicated family, but feeling I had inhaled the cold salt of the East Anglian coastline from which he sailed when he was well, and run my fingers across the bright wool of the embroideries he made when he was not.

I believe I have already found my book of the year. Blackburn’s “biography”… almost defies the category… But it is so beautifully and hypnotically done that each page leaves you spellbound. Rarely can such an unusual telling so thoroughly, and so movingly, reflect the nature of the life being told.

I wish I could quote something from every page as that would convince you to read this book… This is a book to remind you that wonders lie scattered like jewels in the most ordinary places.

It is hard to pin down what it is that makes Threads such a warmly attractive book… Julia Blackburn is an odd, sometimes even disconcerting writer, but she is an amazingly good one, too. The words she puts on paper do what written words should do: they make things real… She leaves her reader feeling grateful and happy.

A cleverly crafted book that is far more than the obvious sum of its parts… [A] truly delightful book.

A beautifully illustrated, wry, emphatic and deeply moving triumph.

A poignant meditation on creativity and grief.

The book sounds like a haphazard collection of anecdotes, but is in fact a richly satisfying whole tied together by the autobiographical component. This is a book to be read slowly and savoured for the quality of Blackburn’s vision and her subtle, unadorned yet poetic prose.

Strange, engrossing…superbly illustrated.

Craske remains as private a man as before…but Blackburn’s eloquent appreciation of his work and her sympathy with his sorrows make this remarkable book the best tribute he could have received.

It is hard to tell whether this is a simple or a complicated book: its power lies in its being both.

I don’t know of many books that give a better sense of the frustrations and excitement of research.

The energy is infectious, but the tone is melancholic.

Blackburn captures the understated artist John Craske with elegance and precision.

A vibrant account of the life of Norfolk fisherman John Craske […] another maverick choice of subject by this always compelling writer.

Outsider art requires outsider biography, and Blackburn, an expert in finding new forms to fit odd lives, has managed her task magnificently.

A gorgeous, dreamy quest, for a man named John Craske.

The book has an understated charm and is a beautifully rendered portrait of an artist’s life and landscape.

This tender biography is gossipy and philosophical by turns.

Executed with undeniable skill and the sense of an intimate acquaintance with life on the open seas.

Julia Blackburn has written ten books of non-fiction, the most recent of which, Time Song, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize. Her family memoir The Three of Us won the 2009 J.R. Ackerley Award, and her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper’s Companions, were both shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy.

Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 
Winner of the New Angle Book Prize 2017 
 
John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as ‘a stuporous state’. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk. 
 
Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So - as with all her books - Julia Blackburn’s account of his life is far from a conventional biography. Instead it is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen’s cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein’s stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns. 
 
Threads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live. It is also about life after death, as Julia’s beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished. 
 
In a gentle meditation on art and fame; on the nature of time and the fact of mortality; and illustrated with Craske’s paintings and embroideries, Threads shows, yet again, that Julia Blackburn can conjure a magic that is spellbinding and utterly her own.

Journeys in and around an Italian Mountain Village

Thin Paths

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award, the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and longlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year, this is a moving and fascinating account of the history, landscape and people of a remote village high in the Ligurian mountains.

My book of the year. Beautiful, beguiling, memorable

Impossible to forget...beautiful and deeply humane

Profoundly moving...absorbing...and compassionate... Blackburn writes beautifully and despite its sorrows, Thin Paths is full of humour and pulsating life

Marvellous... Her writing is as eloquent and elegant as ever

A lyrical patchwork of fine-grained nature writing

Reading Julia Blackburn's account of her life in a remote corner of the Ligurian mountains is like lifting a stone to find a strange, intricate, hidden world...prose that is ruthlessly unsentimental, but full of love

In Liguria Blackburn catches the last survivors, some in their nineties, in time to hear echoes of a culture that is already part of the past

Julia Blackburn's thoughtful book has a poet's direct lyricism...a vivid, moving account

Blackburn brings her special gift for the art of place to this lyrical account of the Italian mountain village where she and her husband settled. Although she writes superbly about landscape and wildlife, it's her neighbours, and their haunting tales, who make the book sing

Julia Blackburn has written five books of non-fiction - Charles Waterton, The Emperor's Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya and With Billie - a family memoir, The Three of Us, which won the 2009 J. R. Ackerley Award, and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a selection of which were published in My Animals and Other Family, and four radio plays, including The Spellbound Horses, which was broadcast in 2011.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award and the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 
 
Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the village and they began to tell her their stories. Of how their village had been trapped in an archaic feudal system and owned by a local padrone who demanded his share of all they had, of the eruption of the Second World War, of the conflict between the fascists and the partisans, of death and fear and hunger of how they hid like like foxes in the mountains. 'Write it down for us,' they said, 'because otherwise it will all be lost.' 
 
Thin Paths is a celebration of the songlines of one place that could be many places and a celebration of the humour and determination of the human spirit.

A Family Story

The Three of Us

'This memoir [has] a warmth and love it's hard to imagine could have been possible... a work of art in itself: a careful weaving in and out of personal memories and present pain to create something remarkable' - Herald

A small masterpiece, much to be recommended

Blackburn has written an exceptionally perceptive and fascinating book, a tribute by a remarkable daughter to the resilience of filial love

The Three of Us contains all the mental and physical violations that cling to the bare bones of their shared past... Blackburn was never afraid of her father. It's very clear in the book - he is described even at his blackest moments with affection and warmth

Blackburn's first 16 years sound quite frankly too bad to be true. Nightmarish infact - though she details them in such an ingenuous, matter-of-fact manner that she somehow manages to make terrible events seem almost funny.... the resulting memoir is mesmerising and brilliant

Despite the darkness of the rooms she re-enters, her book isn't gloomy in the least... Extracts from her journal and faxes to Herman offset the main narrative, which darts back and forth in time. It's a structure that works wonderfully well... However unforgiving her detail, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner is the message of this extraordinary book

Having read her family memoir, a book that engrosses and horrifies in equal measure, it is hard not to be reminded of Larkin's famous axiom: 'They fuck you up your mum and dad.'... 'Blackburn's writing transcends the frightening idiosyncrasies of her upbringing. Her prose is understated and evocative, despite the desperate truths that lurk beneath.'... 'It would be easy for Blackburn to attribute blame or to seek explanation, but her refusal to do so gives this triptych portrait an integrity and honesty that it could otherwise lack.

The fact that I was unable to put [the book] down is proof of how well she tells [the story], and of how such an experience, if described with real skill, honesty, and sensitivity, will make a valuable book, however many others of a similar kind have been published.... I ended it feeling very glad indeed that I had overcome my first disinclination to begin it

[Blackburn] has written an exceptionally perceptive and fascinating book, a tribute by a remarkable daughter to the resilience of filial love.

In this memoir she describes her eccentric, dangerous, wonderful bohemian parents...Blackburn emerged from this turmoil as a fine writer, and this book is full of understanding and reconciliation

This piercing memoir paints in vivid colours Julia Blackburn's nightmarish childhood

Blackburn tells us about these things in a compelling authorial voice which is by turns numb and incredibly sensitive

Brutally honest book ...deeply moving testament to the love that can somehow survive

An extraordinary family memoir... A bohemian classic

Winner of the J. R. Ackerley Award 
 
This is the story of three people: Julia Blackburn, her father Thomas and her mother Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic, who for many years was addicted to barbiturates; Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious. After her parents were divorced, Julia's mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each should become her lover. When one of the lodgers started an affair with Julia, Rosalie was devastated; when he later committed suicide the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocably. 
 
Or so it seemed until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukaemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life.

My Animals and Other Family

A treat for Christmas, a delightful little book of stories by one of Britain's most original writers.

Julia Blackburn is the author of five books of non-fiction, Charles Waterton, The Emperor's Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya and With Billie, and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is the author of seventeen short stories specially commisioned by BBC Radio, a selection of which were published in My Animals and Other Family, and four radio plays, including The Spellbound Horses, which was broadcast in 2011. She is married to the artist Herman Makkink and they live in Suffolk and Italy.

In these five stories Julia Blackburn recalls the significant animals in her life and in so doing gives us a sidelong glance at the human members of her family, her painter mother and poet father. 
 
First comes Congo the bush baby, from the jungles of Madagascar via Harrods pet department. He slept in an old cap on the back of the door, and could leap about the room via the picture rails. Then there are tropical fish, tortoises, chickens, guinea pigs, foxes (the last three a combustible combination), pigs, and two very distinctive dogs, Julia's own dog, Jason, a cocker spaniel whose habits of servility and loyalty Julia's father, Thomas, was determined to undo ('He's worse than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, fawning at my heels!') and Henry, a Parson Jack Russell terrier that Thomas got after his divorce, a dog of great independence, dignity and forbearance, whom his master used to take mountaineering. 
 
This is a delightful book, wry, funny and wise, and unmistakably the work of Julia Blackburn.

With Billie

'Julia Blackburn has an extraordinary talent for thinking herself into other worlds...So vivid are her conjurings of lives lived elsewhere or long ago, you begin to suspect she sees ghosts' - Evening Standard

Julia Blackburn's book gives a far more complete idea of Holiday as an artist than anything else I have read

This is a raw, true book that evokes not just the life of the great singer Billie Holiday but an entire jazz era.... Blackburn's compelling tale is of whores, drug-pushers, bent policemen and crooked lawyers as well as brilliant musicians, and she brings alive everything she touches

This addition to the tide of Billie Holiday books is extremely welcome. Nowhere else is the context of her life and work so vividly captured

Full of vigour and colour...Ms Blackburn's portrait of a unique artist is moving, revealing and quite unforgettable

Julia Blackburn...has contributed much to the legacy of a remarkable human being

With her assured touch, she has transcribed and framed the verbatim accounts into a resonant piece of social history, never losing sight of the woman who enthralled everyone with whom she came into contact

Often books about jazz musicians make the mistake of over-focusing on the music. Blackburn is more interested in Billie as a person

This is a really marvellous book, the most uninhibitedly intimate portrayal ever of the short, hard life and overall musical triumph of Lady Day...With Billie vividly reflects the chaos that Billie Holiday was born into and only rarely escaped from

'This is a raw, true book that evokes not just the life of the great singer Billie Holiday but an entire jazz era....' Mail on Sunday 
 
 Julia Blackburn's brilliant and haunting book is a life of Billie Holiday told in the voices of those who knew her. 
 
During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz. 
 
These same recordings have been used as the basis for the 2020 film, Billie. 
 
Billie Holiday is usually portrayed as a tragic victim of her own vices. These intimate stories give us a much deeper picture of her personality - we witness scenes from her chaotic childhood; we see her when she first arrives in Harlem at the age of fourteen; and we follow her through her rise to fame and into the notoriety that came so close on its heels. 
 
Billie's friends and lovers and fellow musicians talk about her troubles and her addictions, but they also have a lot to say about her warmth and her courage, and the ones who were really close to her understood that although she had a lot of men and drugs and booze in her life, all that really mattered was the singing. 
______________ 
 
PRAISE FOR WITH BILLIE: 
'Gives a far more complete idea of Holiday as an artist than anything else I have read, GuardianJulia Blackburn's book gives a far more complete idea of Holiday as an artist than anything else I have read' Guardian 
'This addition to the tide of Billie Holiday books is extremely welcome. Nowhere else is the context of her life and work so vividly captured' Toni Morrison 
'Full of vigour and colour...Ms Blackburn's portrait of a unique artist is moving, revealing and quite unforgettable' Economist

Julia Blackburn

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction.

Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity and power. Again and again, as I read, I gasped at the intense relevance and importance, as well as the beauty of this book.

Hugh Brody, author of THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN

A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution.

A fascinating, poetic response to our contemporary age.

[Blackburn's] wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a drily downbeat humour and a genius for serendipity... Blackburn doesn't give us answers. Instead she works a miracle. In this book dead people talk in a dead language, describing a culture and way of life which is also dead, and yet, thanks to...Blackburn's tactful, beautifully-framed extrapolations, those dead come before us and speak.

Parallels [with the present] bring complexity and immediacy to the book... Blackburn powerfully evokes the Karoo... Her observations of her fellow travellers are insightful.

[Blackburn's] writing of history and memory - both personal and public - is so deft as to seem effortless. This elliptical and bewitching book is a delight.

Dreaming the Karoo is at once a mesmerising meandering into the near-extinct language and sensibility of the /Xam, and a diary of that intangible sense of loss and loneliness that so many of us felt during lockdown.

It is such a wonderful book. It made me stretch my hand to my lover. It made me want to show my children the footprints, scars and stones under our feet. It made me want to sit down to look at the sea... It made me deeply grateful that I am alive.

Both Wordsworthian and Woolfian ... This book is a wonder.

Breathtaking... [a] splendidly rich book... I admire the intelligence, the appetite for discovery and the shining imagination that have gone into it.

This book gripped me by its clairvoyant and poetic conversation with the past and Julia Blackburn's extraordinary sympathy and perspicacity in finding in the lightest and smallest traces the story of our human species

A People Called the /Xam

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. 
 
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. 
 
Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. 
 
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers. 
 
'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing 
 
'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

Julia Blackburn

Praise for Dreaming the Karoo

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction.

Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity an ...

A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution.

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction.

Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity an ...

A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution.

An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction.

Travelling to the landscapes of the Karoo, yet remaining tied to a corner of the English countryside, Blackburn explores the ruthlessness of colonial frontiers... Here is a work of astonishing breadth, clarity an ...

A miraculous act of retrieval and restitution.

Books by Julia Blackburn

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