British academic, critic, novelist, and poet
Patrick McGuinness FRSL FLSW (born 1968) is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.
Life.
McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian mother and an English father of Irish descent from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK.
Work.
McGuinness's production is divided between literary criticism and fiction, memoir and poetry. His first novel, "The Last Hundred Days" (Seren, 2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title "Les Cent Derniers Jours". It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. He won Wales Book of the Year a second time, in 2015, for his memoir "Other People's Countries". His second novel, "Throw Me to the Wolves", won the Encore Award for best second novel from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a fictionalised account of the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, and the subsequent persecution and false accusations against schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies, who was McGuinness's English teacher at school in Bristol in the 1980s.
Literary Criticism and Scholarship.
Patrick McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow in French at St Anne's College St Anne's College, Oxford. Among his academic publications there is a study of T. E. Hulme, an English literary critic and poet who was influenced by Bergson and who, in turn, had a strong influence on English modernism. He is the author of a book on the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and modern theatre, and a book on poetry and radical politics in late 19th C France. He has also translated Stéphane Mallarmé, a major symbolist poet, and edited an anthology in French of symbolist and decadent poetry.
McGuinness edited two volumes of the Argentinian-Welsh poet and novelist Lynette Roberts, who was highly appreciated by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves. According to McGuinness, Roberts "might fairly be claimed to be our greatest female war poet" whose work "constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language."
Poetry, Fiction and Memoir.
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 ;poem ;
Daytime Drinking
First sip: gentle as a stream overreaching,
supple as a rope-bridge in the air;
The second, long as the creak of floorboards,
firm as a leg-iron clasp;
The third, sudden as the trap door beneath you,
the rudderless slide back to thirst.
 ;/poem ;
From "Jilted City" (2010)
McGuinness published his first poetry collection, "The Canals of Mars", in 2004. His poems have appeared in numerous athologies and translated anthologies of British and Irish poetry.
Patrick McGuinness's first novel, "The Last Hundred Days", was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. A thriller dealing with the collapse of communism, it is set in Ceaușescu's Romania, one of the most paranoid totalitarian regimes where spying on the citizens' private lives threatens all human relationships. The protagonist is an English student teaching in Bucharest, where McGuinness himself lived in the years leading up to the revolution.
In 2011, McGuinness was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
His memoir of childhood in the Belgian town of Bouillon, 'Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory', appeared in 2014 and won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 2015 he published Poetry and Radical Politics in fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford University Press).
His second novel, "Throw Me to the Wolves", was published in 2019 by Cape and won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award.It was also longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association (CWA)'s Gold Dagger Award. It is part detective thriller, part meditation on memory.
In 2021, he published Real Oxford, a personal book, part urban topography, part literary wander, about the Oxford beyond the classic university city.
He is the editor of 2-volume Penguin Book of French Short Stories, 2022.
His most recent book of poetry is Blood Feather, published by Jonathan Cape.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
References.
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