Julia Blackburn

Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

Every garden needs a song. But what happens when singing is forbidden? Rube the robin has always led The Songbird Choir. But when Flint and his gang arrive searching for buried treasure, they tear up the garden, scatter the singers, and make one thing brutally clear: no singing allowed. Forced to flee with his battered choir, Rube faces the dangerous Farmlands, a hungry fox, and a devastating betrayal. Worse still, Blanche-the tuneless cuckoo chick he once rejected-has vanished into the storm. Now Rube must learn to listen, rescue a friend, and unite his broken choir before spring is lost forever. A soaring tale about finding your voice, choosing your family, and learning that harmony isn't about sounding the same-it's about singing together. Ideal for fans of M.G. Leonard's Twitchers series and readers who loved The Wild Robot, The Last Wild, and Charlotte's Web. Book 2 in The Songbird Choir Series - For readers aged 8-12

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess. In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam. Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said. Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers. 'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing 'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

A spellbinding new book by the much-acclaimed writer, a journey to South Africa in search of the lost people called the /Xam - a haunting book about the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossess.In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa to see for herself the ancestral lands that had once belonged to an indigenous group called the /Xam.Throughout the nineteenth century the /Xam were persecuted and denied the right to live in their own territories. In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction, several /Xam individuals agreed to teach their intricate language to a German philologist and his indomitable English sister-in-law. The result was the Bleek-Lloyd Archive: 60,000 notebook pages in which their dreams, memories and beliefs, alongside the traumas of their more recent history, were meticulously recorded word for word. It is an extraordinary document which gives voice to a way of living in the world which we have all but lost. 'All things were once people', the /Xam said.Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic, but she had gathered enough from reading the archive, seeing the /Xam lands and from talking to anyone and everyone she met along the way, to be able to write this haunting and powerful book, while living her own precarious lockdown life. Dreaming the Karoo is a spellbinding new masterpiece by one of our greatest and most original non-fiction writers.'An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty' Olivia Laing'Blackburn's wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic books are poetic, informed by a...genius for serendipity' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

Shortly after her husband's death, Julia Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the vast once-populated stretch of land that connected Great Britain to Continental Europe thousands of years ago but is now under the North Sea. She felt driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there as revealed through artifacts and the fossil record. In Time Song, she brings us along on her journey, introducing us to the paleontologists, archaeologists, fishermen, and fellow Doggerland enthusiasts she meets along the way. What emerges is a lyrical exploration--part travelogue and part history--and a profound meditation on time and the immensity of the past.

Marie-Thérèse Walter was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was forty-six. These poems - as simple and direct as quick sketches - use her voice to tell the story of the relationship with Picasso and what it meant to her from its first beginnings, until the day on which she took her own life, three years after his death. The poems illuminate his love for a woman who was, as John Berger says, 'the sexually most important affair of his life'; they also, perhaps, make sense of Marie-Thérèse's love for him. Jeff Fisher's drawings animate the vivid voice of Marie-Thérèse, created with great immediacy by Julia Blackburn.

Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 Winner of the New Angle Book Prize 2017John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Biography Award and the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999.

This is the moving story of three people: acclaimed writer Julia Blackburn; her father, Thomas--a poet and alcoholic with an addiction to barbiturates; and her mother, Rosalie--a flirtatious painter with no boundaries. "Striking.... Colored by passion and memory.... Blackburn] artfully smudges the line between memoir and reportage." --Francine Prose, Harper's After Julia's parents divorced, her mother took in male lodgers with the hope they would become her lovers. When one of the lodgers began an affair with Julia, competitive Rosalie was devastated; he later committed suicide, shattering whatever relationship between mother and daughter remained. After thirty years, Rosalie, diagnosed with leukemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life. Only then were they allowed, at long last, to exist with an ease they had never known.

when he later committed suicide the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocably. Or so it seemed until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukaemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life.

Congo the bush baby, from the jungles of Madagascar and the tropical fish, tortoises, chickens, guinea pigs, foxes, pigs, and two dogs. This book recalls the animals in the authors' life and in so doing gives us a sidelong glance at the human members of her family, her painter mother and poet father.

A haunting portrait of legendary singer Billie Holiday intertwines more than 150 interviews and personal revelations into an illuminating study of Lady Day, as seen through the eyes of friends, lovers, fellow musicians, critics, producers, pimps and junkies, narcotics agents, and others, from her Baltimore childhood to her rise to fame and her tragic death. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

During the 1970s a young woman called Linda Kuehl, planning to write a biography of Billie, recorded interviews with more than 150 people. Kuehl died in 1978 and her book never came out, but her recordings survived to provide the raw material for this extraordinary account of the life of America's First Lady of Jazz.

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted an illness that left him stone deaf. Yet he continued to interact with the world and to create, spending the next thirty-five years in a world emptied of sound but bursting with images of pageantry, cruelty, and pathos. In this brilliant, idiosyncratic book a kaleidoscope of biography, memoir, history, and meditation Julia Blackburn vividly imagines the artist s world during this time. She recreates the artist s friendships and love affairs and breathes life into the subjects of his paintings: an ethereally lovely duchess; the spoiled grotesques of the Bourbon court; the atrocities of the Napoleonic wars. Old Man Goya is a rare work of empathy and imagination, a stunning portrait of the mind and life of a great artist."

An account of the life of Francisco de Goya from 1792 when he was 47 and contracted a serious illness which left him totally deaf. Through times of war and political turmoil he continued to work with passion and ferocious energy, transforming the scenes around him into his visionary artwork.