Edward Carey’s PLAGUES AND PENCILS: A YEAR IN PANDEMIC SKETCHES is published in North America by the University of Texas Press today. Casey Kittrell, Senior Acquisitions Manager at University of Texas Press, bought North American rights from Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann. The collection of Carey’s beautiful, haunting lockdown drawings includes a foreword by Max Porter and was published in the UK by Gallic Books as B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS.
Edward will be in conversation with Austin Kleon and signing copies of PLAGUES AND PENCILS at a launch event at BookPeople in Austin at 7 p.m. on Wednesday 14 September. More details here.
In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and one hundred and fifty Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.
Carey’s pencil fills the page with the marvellous and intriguing, picturing people, characters, animals, monsters, and his favourite bird to draw, the grackle. He reaches into history and fiction to escape grim reality through flights of vivid imagination – until events demand the drawings “look straight on.”
Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics. For Carey, though, trapped inside a home he loves, these portraits are something more, a way to chart time, an artist’s way of creating connection in isolation.
Casey says: ‘We’re delighted to be publishing Edward Carey’s latest work, and I’m personally delighted to be working with someone whose art I’ve admired for years. I would buy it just for the grackles, but, really, it's a gift for anyone, especially creative folks, who felt the need to do something, to somehow mark the time and resist the torpor, of the pandemic.’
Edward Carey says: ‘I'm thrilled that the University of Texas Press, whose books I've loved and cherished for years, will publish this book of pandemic drawings. I sat in a small corner of Texas during the pandemic and drew every day to communicate, to travel, to mourn, to celebrate and to keep busy. It's so fitting that UT press is giving this book a home in America – its starting point is Texas and it contains various grackles. I'm so delighted to be working with them again.’
Isobel Dixon says: ‘With great determination, artistry, empathy and generosity, Edward gave his many followers a great gift during lockdown. So many brilliant daily images – thought-provoking, rousing, delightful, a rich range that endures far beyond the instant online moment. I’m so happy that Casey Kittrell and the University of Texas Press have joined in to spread the word – and image – further afield. All power to publisher, artist and (B) pencil, and here’s to many more happy readers.’
Edward’s previous book, THE SWALLOWED MAN, was published in the UK by Gallic Books in November 2020, and in the US by Riverhead in January 2021. Edward is completing his next novel, EDITH HOLLER, which will be published by Riverhead in the US.
See more about Edward as an illustrator here.
Praise for B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS
‘B is for Black, the kind of pencil [Edward Carey] … used to draw and endite this charming lockdown memoir. Perfect gift for doodlers and illustrators – one day RBG, the next a walrus – made me want to take up drawing again!’ – Margaret Atwood
‘There is so much sharp grace and so much generosity in Carey's art; I loved this book, for its beauty, and for its tenacity of heart.’ – Katherine Rundell
‘Once again Edward Carey has produced a remarkable book, this time blend of words and drawings about both outrage and consolation. Noted mask wearers, shut-ins and plague witnesses rub shoulders with monsters mythical and all too real. Those house arrested days when we mourned together, feared together, loved together as planet are recorded. Birds and writers gather. Injustices howl and graves multiply. And still human beings add beauty to reality – and hope. As Carey writes ‘’There’s magic in the ordinary.’’ The best of us uncover it and pass it on. This book contains magic.’ – A.L. Kennedy
‘Edward Carey probably didn't know what he was getting himself into when he committed to tweeting a daily lockdown drawing, but the results are the best thing by far to come out of a horrible year. Whether a startled moggy or a panda-eyed Hamlet, each drawing is stamped with Carey's unique style and off-kilter sensibility. B: A YEAR IN PLAGUES AND PENCILS is a constant delight.’ – Graeme Macrae Burnet
‘These characterful images are bound together here with words of wistfulness and modest hope.’ – Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer
Praise for Edward Carey
‘If this were music, Carey would be Eric Satie. If it were film, he would be Tim Burton.’ – Newsday
‘All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.’ – Max Porter
‘A novel that takes the shape of a constellation of memories recalled amid idle waiting… Carey is a playful writer whose charming sentences are works of careful craftsmanship… his isn’t the “Pinocchio” of your childhood. Instead, Carey has written something more cerebral, an existential fairy tale for adults told by an old artist considering the tragedy of life.’ — Eric Nguyen, The Washington Post
‘Edward Carey has an imagination of tremendous range and power. He transforms the familiar stuff of life in shapes utterly strange and marvellous.’ – Patrick McGrath
‘Edward Carey, with OBSERVATORY MANSIONS] proves the potential brilliance of the novel form.’ — John Fowles
‘Carey writes with such persuasive authority, and we are inclined to believe him …The emphasis on detail in Carey’s sweetly detached, exact prose has forebears in the illuminated dreams of Borges and Calvino and Georges Perec.’ — Carey Harrison, The New York Times Review of Books
'Wonderfully weird... Carey reproduces, or invents... with relentless energy.' – Herald Scotland
‘Edward Carey is bursting with imagination and madness.’ — Lire
About Edward Carey:
Photo: Elizabeth McCracken
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in North Walsham, Norfolk, England, during an April snowstorm. Like his father and his grandfather, both officers in the Royal Navy, he attended Pangbourne Nautical College, where the closest he came to following his family calling was playing Captain Andy in the school’s production of Showboat. Afterwards he joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at Hull University. He has written plays for the National Theatre of Romania and the Vilnius Small State Theatre, Lithuania. In England his plays and adaptations have been performed at the Young Vic Studio, the Battersea Arts Centre, and the Royal Opera House Studio. He has collaborated on a shadow puppet production of Macbeth in Malaysia, and with the Faulty Optic Theatre of Puppets.
He is the author of the novels OBSERVATORY MANSIONS, THE IREMONGER TRILOGY, ALVA & IRVA, THE SWALLOWED MAN and LITTLE, all of which he illustrated. He always draws the characters he writes about, but often the illustrations contradict the writing and vice versa and getting both to agree with each other takes him far too long.
He has lived in England, France, Romania, Lithuania, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, and the United States. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which is not near the sea.
Visit Edward Carey's website here
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