Burning Man

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE
PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SPECTATOR, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back. She makes Lawrence live and breathe, annoy and captivate you ... she conjures the past with such clarity and wit and flair that it feels utterly present' Katherine Rundell
'A brilliantly unconventional biography, passionately researched and written with a wild, playful energy' Richard Holmes
_____________________
D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him.
History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how - one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love - can we hear his voice above the noise?
Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson's triptych of biographical tales present a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever.
'No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man' Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye
'The most original voice in life-writing today' Lucasta Miller, author of Keats

Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist and the author of six works of non-fiction, including The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography; Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize; and Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence, which won the Plutarch Award, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Award and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.