A HISTORY OF WATER, Edward Wilson-Lee’s astonishing biography of Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões, has been shortlisted for the illustrious 2023 James Tait Black Biography Prize.
The James Tait Black Prizes are the longest-running literary prizes in Britain, with two prizes in total – one for fiction and one for biography.
The other titles shortlisted for this year’s biography prize are: HOMESICK by Jennifer Croft; A LINE IN THE WORLD: A YEAR ON THE NORTH SEA COAST by Dorthe Nors, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight; and COME BACK IN SEPTEMBER: A LITERARY EDUCATION ON WEST SIXTY-SEVENTH STREET, MANHATTEN by Darryl Pinckney.
The titles shortlisted for this year’s fiction prize are as follows: BITTER ORANGE TREE by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver; BOLLA by Pajtim Statovci, translated from Finnish by David Hackston; and AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz.
On this year’s biography shortlist, judge Dr Simon Cooke comments: ‘Absorbing, resonantly voiced, and beautifully realised, these life-writings open fascinating and various worlds, and searchingly inquire into the transformative relations between literature and life.’
The winners of both prizes will be announced by the University of Edinburgh in July. Past winners of the biography prize include the likes of Martin Amis, Claire Tomalin and Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
A Times Literary Supplement ‘Book of the Year’ as well as one of The Times ‘Best History Books of 2022’, A HISTORY OF WATER follows the interconnected lives of two men across the renaissance globe. One of them, Damião de Góis – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returned home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to lock himself in the Torre de Tombo, the first great national archive of Europe, before dying in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other, Luís de Camões – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up becoming 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. In vividly charting those struggles, Edward Wilson-Lee resurrects de Góis’ fluid and dynamic vision of history. A history whose currents endlessly rise up and converge, turbulent, sonorous, and powerful.
A HISTORY OF WATER was first published to great acclaim in hardback by William Collins in August 2022, and the paperback edition will be published in August this year.
About Edward Wilson-Lee
Edward Wilson-Lee is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. After growing up in Kenya and Switzerland, he went to university in London, New York, Oxford and Cambridge, living briefly in Mexico and New Orleans in between.
His previous books SHAKESPEARE IN SWAHILILAND and THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPWRECKED BOOKS have been widely acclaimed, published in the UK and US, and translated into 11 languages.
Praise for A HISTORY OF WATER
‘A very few times in the course of a reader's life a book appears that shatters one's assumptions about how and why things came to pass. A HISTORY OF WATER is one such book. A mind-blowing achievement.’ – Alberto Manguel
‘This book is itself something of a wonder: beautifully written and utterly mesmerising. I loved every page.’ – Jessie Childs, The Sunday Times
‘A wonderful – and wonder-full – recreation of a crucial episode in European history… The book also has a rare beauty; written with elegant restraint, its every page is rich in numinous sense of vanishings and misunderstandings, gaps in the records, marvels and mysteries… hauntingly vivid’ – Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph
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