Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle's work for a French animation studio requires him to oversee production at various Asian studios on the grim frontiers of free trade. His employer puts him up for months at a time in 'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual deprivations of a man very far from home. After Pyongyang, his book about the strange society that is North Korea, Delisle turned his attention to Shenzhen, the cold, urban city in Southern China that is sealed off with electric fences and armed guards from the rest of the country. The result is another brilliant graphic novel - funny, scary, utterly original and illuminating.

Shenzhen

A Travelogue From China

Sara Wheeler

In a series of remarkable books - Travels in a Thin Country, Terra Incognita, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry Garrard, Too Close to the Sun and The Magnetic North - Sara Wheeler has shown that she is not only one of the finest travel writers of her generation but a very fine biographer too. Published to coincide with her fiftieth birthday, Access All Areas gathers together a selection of her shorter pieces, both journalism and introductions to other books. 
 
As one would expect, the frozen poles of the earth feature often, whether she is spending the night in Captain Scott's hut or reliving the adventures of Shackleton and Nansen. But its hot places feature too - Malawi, Kerala, Cuba and Bangladesh. She writes brilliantly of her heroes - Mary Kingsley, Fanny Trollope, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris and Sybille Bedford - and about the pains and pleasures of writing biography. Worried that having her children would end her roaming, she took her children with her, to the Arctic, and on a brilliantly depicted cruise on the QE2. She learns to bellydance, to strip, and to walk on the wing of a biplane at 3000 feet. 
 
This is an immensely varied and satisfying collection.

Access All Areas

Selected Writings 1990-2010

Famously referred to as part of the 'Axis-of-Evil', North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When the fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. 
 
Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang and its countryside while chaperoned by his translator and a guide. But among the statues, portraits and propaganda of leaders Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il - the world's only Communist dynasty - Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered. 
 
His astute and wry musings on life in the austere and grim regime form the basis of this remarkable graphic novel. Pyongyang is an informative, personal and accessible look at an enigmatic country.

Pyongyang

A Journey in North Korea

Julia Blackburn

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

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