Leia uma entravista de Jorge Andrade no jornal 'Diario de Notícias'.

A History of Water is one of four books on the shorlist for the 2023 James Tait Black biography of the year, the oldest and longest-running literary prize in the U.K. Click here for further details. The winner of the prize is announced in July, with further discussion of the shortlisted works at the Edinburgh Literary Festival in August. 

'Sarà bene dire subito che questo è un libro bello e importante, che si rivolge al grande pubblico dei lettori ma ha molto da dire agli storici' -- legere il recensione di Adriano Prosperi in TuttoLibri qui,  e di Alberto Manguel in Robinson di Repubblica qui. Leggere un colloquio con Il Giornale qui.

Falei com Ana Daniela Soares da programa 'Todas as Palavras' sobre o meu livro 'A Torre dos Segredos'. 

A Torre dos Segredos foi apresentada no programa Nada Será Como Dante.

The Portuguese translation of A History of Water was featured on the Portuguese literary magazine show Nada Será Como Dante. 

Watch here beginning at 12:38.

'A History of Water' has been named a 2022 Book of the Year in the Times, The Sunday Times, Prospect magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement. 

A tradução portugues do livro foi destaque no Expresso, Jornal de Letras, o Diário de Notícias e o Nascer do Sol. 

"Employing prose as luscious as it is meticulous, Wilson-Lee shows us the world through De Góis’s eyes, a wonderful tapestry that includes Ethiopians and Sami, Hieronymus Bosch (he owned three of the master’s fever-dream paintings) and elephants that can write in dust with their trunks." Read the full review here.

"A History of Water artfully juxtaposes the confined spaces inhabited by its subjects––de Góis in his tower and de Camões in his various prisons––with the period's great intellectual investigations. ...The journet is enthralling throughout––as all explorations should be." Read the full review here.

"[This] is a fascinating, ingenious and wonderfully readable book, brilliantly conceived. IT is backed up by an armoury of learned notes that are as beguiling as the text, taking the reader topics such as medieval Vietnamese literature, the printing houses and porcelain factories of Ming China, and early European awareness of Sanskrit. In short, the book is a triumph." Read the full review here.

"A superb study of two men caught in the astonishing ferment of the 16th century...exhilarating, whip-smart...This book is itself something of a wonder: beautifully written & utterly mesmerising. I loved every page." Read the full review here.

"At the heart of Edward Wilson-Lee's erudite and engrossing biography, A History of Water, is the stark contrast between the curious, questioning world view of Damiao and that of his more famous contemporary, Luis de Camoes...The book combines literary flair with deep historical insight." Read the full review here [paywall].

"One of the many virtues of Edward Wilson-Lee’s fascinating, elegantly written book is to plunge us into that scene, and to follow a trail outward from this global city across Europe, to Africa, India and beyond." Read the full review here.

“A wonderful – and wonder-full – recreation of a crucial episode in European history…the book has a rare beauty: written with elegant restraint, its every page is rich in a numinous sense of vanishings and misunderstandings…Wilson-Lee has conjured up a hauntingly vivid evocation of [this] moment". Read the full review here [paywall].

De Gezonken Verzameling (The Dutch translation of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books) has been reviewed in De Standaard, and has been chosen as a top non-fiction pick both there and by De Tijd.

A taster of the epitomes emerging from the rediscovered Libro de los Epitomes from Hernando Colón's library has been published in Harper's magazine––including a secret volume by Hippocrates, a guide to Renaissance student hazing, and a letter from the pen of Lucifer. Read the article here.

Though many things have been on pause over the last year, 'Catalogue' has continued feature in the Peruvian, Spanish and American press, been plugged by a rock star, and is shorly forthcoming in a Dutch translation from Meulenhoff. 

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books  has been awarded the 2019 Hessell-Tiltman Prize by the English PEN organisation.  Read the judges citation and more here.

Reseñas de El Memorial de los Libros Naufragados han aparecido en El Pais (XL Seminal), El Mundo,  El Huffpost, ABC Cultural, La Razon, La Vanguardia, y muchos otros periódicos.

"La savante biographie que ... consacre l'universitaire britannique Edward Wilson-Lee [à Hernando Colomb] rend un superbe hommage à cet utopiste de la Renaissance." Lisez ici.

“Wilson-Lee’s main subject… is an intellectual hunger at once dazzling and monstrous: Hernando [Colon’s] insatiable urge to know and to possess… The book’s rich descriptions of Spain, Italy and the Low Countries bustle with local detail, and the early printed images interspersed throughout make it feel like a travel guide to the past. For lovers of history, Wilson-Lee offers a thrill on almost every page… Edward Wilson-Lee’s magnificent book helps us understand [Hernando’s] obsessive desire to gather and preserve, even in the face of chaos.” Read the review.

"The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a gripping reconstruction of Hernando’s rich and varied life.", writes Fernando Cervantes in this week's Times Literary Supplement

In an exciting and important development, one of the key missing pieces of Hernando's library--the Libro de los Epítomes, in which his team of paid readers summarised volumes from the library--has been discovered in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen, where it has been for 300 years. The story has been covered in the Guardian, NPR's All Things Considered, and elsewhere.

Ernest Hilbert has reviewed The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books for The Wall Street Journal. Read the review here.

Literary Website BookRiot has featured The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books on a list of 50 Spectacular Books to read this Spring.

Publisher's Weekly and Bookpage have both given starred reviews to 'The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books', adding to the two starred reviews already received from the American Library Association and Kirkus. Publisher's Weekly calls the book a 'fascinating account brings back to wholeness “the largest private library of the day”', while Bookpage calls it "at once an adventure tale and a history of ideas that continue to resonate."

Both Kirkus and Booklist have given starred reviews to The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books in anticipation of its US release by Scribner. Kirkus called the book "An elegantly written, absorbing portrait of a visionary man and his age", while Booklist calls it "astonishing for both its geographic and intellectual breadth".

Stuart Kelly writes in The Scotsman: "The most thought-provoking works to appear in the past year were often passed over by bestsellers lists and literary prizes....Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue Of Shipwrecked Books is something of a wonder. .... This wide-ranging book about a wide-ranging man takes in cartography, biography (he wrote the first one of his father), botany, bibliography and much more."

 

The Italian translation of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books--Il Catalogo dei Libri Naufragati (Bollati Boringhieri) has been the subject of a feature in the Venerdì supplement of La Repubblica, by Marco Cicala, and has also been reviewed in La Stampa, Il Mattino, and Il Libraio. 

"Edward Wilson-Lee’s spellbinding Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, begins like a Gabriel Garciá Márquez novel — “On the morning of his death Hernando Colon called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed” — and its hypnotic grip never flags. Ostensibly a biography of Columbus’s illegitimate son, the compulsive gatherer of a “universal library” it tears through the Admiral’s last fantastic voyage, the son witnessing the mystical derangement of the father, supping on manatee, beaches packed with crocodiles, wreckage and mutinies, but the son’s great voyage towards the ultimate compendium of books is made no less thrilling through Wilson-Lee’s prodigious writing: at once poetically sharp and broadly humane." Read the review.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books has been named as a Book of the Year by Marina Warner in The New Statesman, Honor Clerk in The Spectator, and  Kate Wiles in History Today.  Marina Warner writes that the book is " a tour de force of sifting through dusty fragments and of vivid biographical storytelling, as well as a delicious, Borgesian dream for all bookworms and lovers of libraries and print ephemera."

Read Simon Schama's extraordinary review of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books in the Financial Times. 

Joseph O'Connor picks 'The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books' as one of his summer reads in The Irish Times.

Alexander Sampson reviews The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books in the THE, a Book of the Week Pick.

The Saturday Telegraph picks The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books as one of its summer reads.

Tim Smith-Laing gives a five-star review in the Saturday Telegraph.

I went on R4's Open Book programme to speak to Mariella Frostrup about The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

Alison Flood previews The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books in the Guardian Books section.

Dennis Duncan reviews The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books in The Spectator:  "Wilson-Lee’s great strength is the subtlety with which Hernando’s public life as a courtier and his private life as a collector are interwoven. Unless you like libraries a lot then the most important thing about Hernando is not the most interesting. But in these elegantly handled parallels, Wilson-Lee leads us almost by stealth to an understanding of his subject’s greatest achievement. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books offers us the biography of a man whose peripatetic life took him from the shores of an uncharted world to the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, from Tudor England to Medici Rome. But, at the same time, it gives us a picture of an extraordinary mind, conceiving and then creating a sort of steampunk Google."

"Edward Wilson-Lee’s fascinating and beautifully written account of how Hernando conceived and assembled his library is set within a highly original biography of the compiler. It’s a work of imagination restrained by respect for evidence, of brilliance suitably alloyed by erudition, and of scholarship enlivened by sensitivity and acuity. [...] The ‘library that would collect everything’ became, as it grew unmanageably, a Borgesian labyrinth of ‘baffling marvels’. Wilson-Lee describes it with verve and strews his account with Rabelaisian lists, incantatory and almost magical in effect, of the sort Hernando loved."  -- Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Literary Review

Ed Simon reviews Shakespeare in Swahililand for website The Millions, a channel of the LA Review of Books: ''Wilson-Lee’s is an odd hodgepodge of a book—part memoir, part travelogue, part historical account, part literary criticism. And yet despite its chimerical nature, it is an effective book, combining as it does an adept theoretical orientation, an admirable facility with the Explication de texte of Shakespeare’s language, and a humanism that is sometimes lacking in the most arid of literary theory. '

I wrote for Prospect Magazine on Shakespeare, Trump, and the history of being one's own judge.

The Daily Mail says "this is a remarkable account of how [Shakespeare's] work is woven into the fabric of African life."

"One of the great delights of this book is thus the shrewdness of its literary and political analysis, but it can also be read as a kind of general history of East African independence movements, as well as a personal travelogue." Read the review.

“Shakespeare in Swahililand”, writes Michael Ramsey, " is an enjoyable story full of history and valuable insight into the work of England’s preeminent playwright and poet, told by a man whose prose is so well crafted that the reader will feel as if he/she was on the road with Edward Wilson-Lee while he was doing his research." Read the review.

I wrote for Foreign Affairs on South Sudan, Shakespeare, and the curious history of theatre in East Africa.

Here's a piece I wrote for FSG's Work in Progress about reading in unexpected places.

The Foreign Policy blog takes a look at Shakespeare's global influence.

"While all this history is fascinating, it’s Wilson-Lee’s conclusion—the African Shakespeare is now being embraced back in his home country—that’s especially compelling ... “The Shakespeare made in Africa has come to replace the one that was taken there,” writes Wilson-Lee. “It is a strange and beautiful renewal: [Shakespeare] is much better for it.” By the end of Shakespeare in Swahililand, any of its reader will have the same conviction." Read the review.

Shakespeare in Swahililand features in this celebration of the Shakespeare anniversary written by Volker Weidermann.

Neera Kapur calls Shakespeare in Swahililand "A riveting celebration of the bard as a global poet ... a perfect journey to the meeting of cultures."

I spoke to Spiked! Review editor Tim Black about why Africa is the place to go to test Shakespeare's universalism.

To celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's passing, I joined the Reverend Richard Coles and Aasmah Mir on BBC 4's Saturday Live to talk about why searching for Shakespeare in unlikely places is the best way to understand him.

On the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's death, I spoke to BBC World Service's Fred Dove on how Shakespeare helped to shape the course of East African history.

Shakespeare in Swahililand is now available as an audiobook, read by the wonderful Gordon Griffin!

I sat down with Matt Elton of the BBC History Magazine to talk about Shakespeare, Africa, and the 400th Anniversary.

Here's a piece I wrote for the London Metro's 'Literary Landscape' section on reading and travelling.

I spoke to Michael Kerr of The Telegraph about Shakespeare, travel, and Eastern Africa.

The Independent picks Shakespeare in Swahililand as one of the six best Shakespeare books to celebrate the anniversary.

The New Criterion features Shakespeare in Swahililand as one of its 'Critic's Picks'.

Andrew Lycett calls Shakespeare in Swahililand "a fascinating book - part travelogue, part cultural history ... Wilson-Lee proves a perceptive and entertaining guide to the Bard's influence in Swahililand". 

Steve Barfield writes in The Lady "I thought nothing could surprise me about the impact of England’s greatest cultural figure, but this fascinating, readable book about his influence in East Africa certainly did."

Andrew Donaldson calls Shakespeare in Swahililand "a glorious melange of travel, biography, history and satire in which misfits, explorers, intellectuals, colonialists, settlers, eccentrics and politicians live out their dreams in East Africa through Shakespeare".

‘It has successfully told a lesser-known story of Africa, and it is a story worth knowing’. Read the review.

Daniel Hahn calls Shakespeare in Swahililand "vivid and full of insights" in a review in The Independent on Sunday.

The Times Higher Education Supplement features Shakespeare in Swahililand. 

Here's a piece I wrote for the digital school newspaper The Day about Shakespeare's global impact.

Shakespeare in Swahililand among the Top Ten Books to Read in March chosen by theWorld Travel Guide.

The Bookseller calls Shakepeare in Swahililand a 'striking literary debut' that 'provides fascinating insights into the region, gets to the heart of what makes Shakespeare so universal, and muses on the role his writings have played in thinking about what it means to be human'. 

Excited to have been included among the things to look forward to in the Shakespeare 400 celebration!

A preview in the Wall Street Journal of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations, featuring Shakespeare in Swahililand.