Carcanet Press Poetry Publisher

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Congratulations to Carcanet for paying equal attention to new poets and to modern classics. The Collected H.D., Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Yvor Winters are all essential books, and Carcanet is doing a public service keeping them in print.

Thom Gunn

News

Carcanet presents Muriel Spark: A Celebration

Monday, 18 Jan 2010

Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark

with Professor Martin Stannard and Dr Andrew Biswell

Friday 29th January, 1-2pm in the Committee Room, Manchester Central Library

In the latest partnership event between Carcanet and Manchester Central Library, we celebrate the remarkable life of one of the twentieth century’s best-loved novelists. Spark’s biographer, Professor Martin Stannard from the University of Leicester, and Dr Andrew Biswell, an expert on twentieth century fiction and literary biography from MMU, will discuss Spark’s life and work and the subject of literary biography. With readings from Spark’s novels, poems and autobiography. This is a FREE event; email info at carcanet.co.uk or telephone 0161 834 8730 for more information.

Following the recent publication of Martin Stannard’s widely acclaimed Muriel Spark: The Biography, Carcanet has reissued Spark's autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. The narrative, which is as brilliant and witty as any of her novels, begins with Spark's childhood and schooldays in Edinburgh (taught by the original ‘Miss Jean Brodie’) and ends in the late 1950s with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. 'In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live,' Spark says. With a characteristic lightness of touch, Spark describes the key episodes of her life: her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, life in wartime London, working at the Foreign Office as one of the 'girls of slender means', editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism. Curriculum Vitae traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged.

'Cast in the dye of Edinburgh’s caustic morality, Ms Spark emerges as one of her own best characters.' - Clare Boylan, Irish Times