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Reading lists

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

The Life of the Poet Arthur Rimbaud in His Own Words

The Drunken Sailor

A biography of the most mythic of literary figures and a paean to wanderlust, from the critically acclaimed author of The Rime of the Modern Mariner, Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads and Cormorance.

Magnificent illustrations… [Hayes] has done a wondrous job… his visual narrative has an intense, restless pace… here is a ribald beauty you find only rarely between two covers.

At once phantasmagorical and bewitching… the best of his career so far.

Hayes’s green-filtered, stylised illustrations have a breathtaking punch to them.

The Drunken Sailor is an Impressionist hymn to Rimbaud. But Hayes' song is greatly embellished with knowledge... You run the gamut when you read this book.

A bewitching work from one of Britain’s finest graphic novelists.

Nick Hayes is an award-winning writer, illustrator and land justice campaigner. In 2020 he co-founded Right to Roam, the influential campaign group advocating for public access to nature in England. He is the author of, among others, the Sunday Times best-seller The Book of Trespass and co-editor of Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You. An acclaimed artist, he has published four graphic novels and exhibited across the country, including at the Hayward Gallery. He lives on a canal boat with no fixed address.

The Drunken Sailor traces the life of Arthur Rimbaud: poet, surrealist, libertine and gun runner. In dazzling artwork, Nick Hayes follows Rimbaud from his youth in Ardennes to the poetry salons of Paris, from the absinthe-glazed passion of his relationship with Verlaine to his flight into the jungles of Indonesia and the deserts of Yemen and Egypt. Told entirely in Rimbaud’s own words, from a new translation of Le bateau ivre, The Drunken Sailor confirms Nick Hayes’ place as one of the most talented graphic novelists at work today.

And the Dust Bowl Ballads

Woody Guthrie

A visual biography of Woody Guthrie – perhaps the greatest, most enduring singer-songwriter to ever live.

Holds within its pages a tremendous sense of time and place… Hayes has set out on an ambitious path and creates a vivid and unforgiving picture.

An inventive and expansive biography worthy of its subject.

A step up [for Hayes] in ambition and execution… An inventive and expansive biography worthy of its subject.

In a handsome square format, with open spreads as wide as the land itself, Hayes captures the man and the times in his lyrical writing and brush artwork.

This is a passionate picture of Guthrie and his times.

Woody Guthrie And The Dust Bowl Ballads is simply splendid. Hayes’ strong graphic hand and integrated text are wonders to pore over and return to.

Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People – men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control. 
 
Guthrie’s influence lives on, a touchstone for Bob Dylan, The Clash and the protest singers of the Occupy movement today. With a delighted eye, and an ear for a tune, Nick Hayes’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Rime of the Modern Mariner brings a legend to life with a generous spirit and crackling moral force its subject would have been proud of.

Nick Hayes

Repairing the Rotten Roots of England

Early one September, Nick Hayes brought his houseboat up the Thames into rural Oxfordshire, mooring opposite a strange tree that towered over the surrounding meadowland. The tree, he would discover, was a hybrid of the eastern cottonwood, brought back from colonial Canada. The land was the Hardwick estate, whose apparently timeless tranquillity – like so much of the English countryside – masks a darker history. Yet Hardwick also tells another, quite different story. 
 
Over the following months, Hayes learns that its rolling hills and fertile valleys are on the front lines of a battle between ownership and belonging. Through a golden autumn, and the frosts and floods of winter and early spring, Hayes explores an estate that, acknowledging the colonial origins of its wealth, has become a haven for those who are both unable and unwilling to be part of a countryside geared towards profit at any cost. Living and working among this extraordinary community of farmers and craftspeople, Hayes contemplates what we have lost in England, as our sense of kinship with the land, and the deep knowledge that arose from it, was destroyed. 
 
Yet, Hayes suggests, if we can learn from the cultures we have exploited, and from the tentative roots being put down in this radical Oxfordshire estate, perhaps we can start to unpick – and even re-enchant – our relationship with the land. The Medicine Tree is a singular act of storytelling and recovery: of giants, gods, witches, trees, horror and hope, of entanglement, reparation and solidarity.

Nick Hayes

Books by Nick Hayes

Articles featuring Nick Hayes

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

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