EDWARD WILSON-LEE
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Edward Wilson-Lee is 1596 Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches Renaissance Literature. After growing up in the US, Kenya, and Switzerland, he studied in London, New York, Oxford and Cambridge and lived in Zimbabwe, Mexico and the United States in between. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two sons.
He writes on books, travel and history, and he has been awarded numerous Fellowships to support his work, including from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Foundation. He has published three books, SHAKESPEARE IN SWAHILILAND, THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS and A HISTORY OF WATER. The latter has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography 2023.
‘A masterly literary detective adventure...a compelling read’ - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
One of The Bookseller's Top 6 Shakespeare picks for 2016 - 'a striking literary debut'
THE GRAMMAR OF ANGELS
Non Fiction, 288 pages, William Collins, January 2025
Does there exist a form of speech so powerful as to allow the speaker to control the listener, taking over their thoughts and even their will?
THE GRAMMAR OF ANGELS tells the story of Renaissance prodigy and polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the uncontested marvel of an age of true wonders. Pico dedicated his life to a quest to find the sublime; to reconcile all existing thought into a philosophy that would settle the most important questions about human existence. This philosophy would also provide tools by which man could transcend his mortal limitations and join the ranks of the angels. At the heart of Pico’s ideas were questions that he traced through the depth and breadth of human thought, from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to the medieval Arabs and Jews. He made use of everything at his disposal from Europe’s broadening horizons and asked primal questions of himself and the world. Why is it that we can be astonished by beauty? That the hairs on the backs of our necks can be made to stand by intoxicating rhythms and harmonies? That we can be provoked to ecstatic experiences by the simple means of an incantation? In Catholic Italy, the implications of this line of thought were dangerous and provoked violent reactions, suggesting as they did that the notion of the individual might be just as much of an illusion as a flat earth or a geocentric universe. That there may well be notions of the divine other than the Christian God.
During a tempestuous life at the exquisite heart of the Italian Renaissance, Pico’s life is a testament to intellectual daring, to a human dignity founded in the willingness to think the unthinkable and to peer over the edge of the abyss in search of answers.
A HISTORY OF WATER
Non Fiction, 352 pages, William Collins, August 2022
A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up as the national poet of Portugal.
The stories of Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life.
Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.
THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS
Biography, 416 pages
HarperCollins, May 2018
This is the scarcely believable – and wholly true – story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain and himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world’s knowledge in one place, his library in Seville.
SHAKESPEARE IN SWAHILILAND
HarperCollins UK, March 2016/FSG US, Sep 2016
History, 304 pages
Published to commemorate 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April 2016, a breathtaking exploration into Shakespeare as a Global poet. This radical, breath-taking book combines travel, history, biography and satire in an ode to Shakespeare.