The Making of Poetry

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019

‘This is a book of wonders’ Sunday Times

‘Spellbinding and intelligent’ Financial Times

‘Extraordinary and engrossing’ Spectator

It was the most extraordinary year. In a book brimming with poetry and nature writing, biography and adventure, Adam Nicolson walks in the footsteps of Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy during the months in the late 1790s they spent together in the Quantock Hills.

Out of it came The Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’, Lyrical Ballads and ‘Tintern Abbey’; Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood; Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses and paeans to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In short, a poetry that sought to remake the world.

• BESTSELLING AUTHOR – Adam Nicolson’s last book, The Seabird’s Cry has sold 38k copies and was Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month. Sea Room has sold 90k copies.

• PRIZE WINNER – Adam won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing in 2018. He has also won the Someset Maugham, Ondaatje, Heineman and Jeffries Literary Prizes

• EXQUISITE PACKAGE – This is not a conventional literary biography. The book combines Adam’s skills as a nature writer to summon up the moonlight walks and high hilltops that inspired Kubla Khan. The book follows the 16 months Coleridge and Wordsworth lived in Nether Stowey month by month. It is illustrated with incredible wood cuts from Tom Hammick www.tomhammick.com

• ALL POWER TO POETRY – April 2020 marks 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth and will be commemorated with a 5 part TV series, a poem a day on BBC R4’s Today Programme and a collection of stamps. Many other promotional opportunities on National Poetry Day.

Competition: Wordsworth and Coleridge the Radical Years; Shelley; Monsters; Lost Words; William Wordsworth; Unruly Times. Richard Holmes; David Wright, Sharon Dogar, Robert Macfarlane; Simon Jenkins; Hunter Davies; A S Byatt; Nicholas Roe; Matthew Bevis