Threads - Julia Blackburn

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Résumé :

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...

Biographie:
Julia Blackburn has written a number of books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry. The Three of Us won the J. R. Ackerley Award, Threads won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award and the New Angle Prize, Time Song was shortlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize, and Thin Paths was shortlisted for the Costa Prize for Biography. Her two novels, The Book of Colour and The Leper's Companions, were both shortlisted for the Women's Prize. She lives in Suffolk and Italy....

Sommaire:

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...