Guest of the ilb 2007
Nicholas Shakespeare
was born in Worcester, England in 1957 and grew up, a diplomat's son,
in Asia and Latin America. He studied literature at the University of
Cambridge and worked as a journalist for the BBC and "The Times". He
was also literary editor of "The Daily Telegraph" and "The Sunday
Telegraph" from 1988 to 1991. It was at this time that his first,
award-winning novel, "The Vision of Elena Silves" (1989) was published.
It narrates a love story played out against the backdrop of the
ideologically divided Peruvian society. The character of the lover and
student revolutionary is based on Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the
Maoist guerilla group "The Shining Path". Shakespeare had already
tried, in the mid eighties, to draw closer to this fascinating and
publicity-shy figure in his reportage "In Pursuit of Guzmán" for
"Granta" magazine. The circumstances of Guzmán's imprisonment
are dealt with in the novel "The Dancer Upstairs" (1995), which John
Malkovich made into a movie based on Shakespeare’s screenplay. The
story revolves around an ill-fated romance: after many years on the
trail of the sought-after guerilla, a colonel finds him in a room above
a dance school run by the ballet instructor he is in love with and
realizes that she herself is involved in the movement.
In his later prose work too, Shakespeare kept alive his journalistic skills of representation,
characterized by a richness of detail, first-hand experience, empathy
and confident use of speech. He achieved fame, in particular, with the
biography of the writer Bruce Chatwin. Without any glorification
Shakespeare offers a profound portrait which he spent eight years researching. In 2004 he presented
another kind of portrait, this one in "In Tasmania", a depiction of the
southern Australian island, in which regional expeditions are rendered
as literary events, in a way reminiscent of Chatwin’s own work.
Personal experiences and family history make connections through an
intermeshing of facts, anecdotes, reports and tales that allows for a
wide-ranging vision of the island.
Shakespeare’s most recent novel is also set in Tasmania. "Secrets of
the Sea" (2007) tells the story of a young couple whose fragile
happiness is put to the test when a storm delivers a stranger to their
house. Shakespeare himself has a home on Tasmania's East Coast. He also
lives in Wiltshire, England. Among his many distinctions are the
Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Award, the American Library
Association Award, and the biennial 2007 Tasmania Book Prize. He has
been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1999.
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