Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness (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.

For other uses, see Patrick McGuinness (disambiguation).

Patrick McGuinness
McGuinness in Paris
McGuinness in Paris
Born1968 (age 54–55)
Tunisia
OccupationPoet, writer, academic, literary critic
Children2

Life

McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent. He grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK.

McGuinness is a member of Plaid Cymru and stood as a candidate for the party in Wales in the 2019 European Parliament election.[1] He has called for the British monarchy to be abolished.[2]

He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales, with his family. He has two children, Osian and Mari McGuinness.

Work

McGuinness's production is divided between academic 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 Writer's Club First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours.[3] It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year.

Literary criticism and academic work

Patrick McGuinness teaches French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. Among his academic publications there is a study of T. E. Hulme,[4] an English literary critic and poet who was influenced by Bergson and who, in turn, had a strong influence on English modernism. He has also translated Stéphane Mallarmé,[5] a major symbolist poet, and edited an anthology in French of symbolist and decadent poetry.[6]

He has edited the works of Marcel Schwob,[7] a French symbolist and short story writer, a friend of Oscar Wilde, and has written on the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.[8]

McGuinness has also 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."[9]

Poetry and novels

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.

From Jilted City (2010)[10]

McGuinness published his first poetry collection, The Canals of Mars, in 2004.[11] The book was translated into Italian (2006). In 2009 Alexandra Buchler and Eva Klimentova translated McGuinness' poems from The Canals of Mars and 19th Century Blues into Czech[12] His poems have appeared in numerous athologies and translated anthologies of British and Irish poetry.

In 2007 he published a poetry pamphlet, 19th Century Blues, which was a winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006.[13]
His latest poetry collection is Jilted City,[14] whose leitmotif is memory, the jilted city, the cité trahie. A sequence in the book called Blue Guide is about the train journeys made by the young McGuinness on the historic railway line, la ligne 162, between Brussels and Luxembourg. The whole collection has been translated into Italian by Giorgia Sensi and published with the title L'età della sedia vuota,[15] the title of one of the poems in the book, as a homage to the female experience and perspective of war, an empty chair on the beach as a symbol of a violent and irrational absence.[16]

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,[17] where McGuinness himself lived in the years leading up to the revolution.

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.[18]

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.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Awards
  • 1998 Eric Gregory Award
  • 2001 Levinson Prize
  • 2005 Roland Mathias Prize, shortlist, The Canals of Mars
  • 2006 Poetry Business Competition, 19th Century Blues
  • 2009 Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
  • 2011 Costa Book Awards, shortlist, The Last Hundred Days
  • 2012 Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres[19]
  • 2012 Winner Wales Book of the Year Award for The Last Hundred Days[20]
  • 2012 Winner Writers' Guild Award for Fiction for The Last Hundred Days.
  • 2012 Winner Prix du Premier Roman Etranger for French translation of The Last Hundred Days.
  • 2012 Finalist of Prix Médicis étranger for Les cent derniers jours.
  • 2012 Finalist of Prix Femina étranger for Les cent derniers jours.
  • 2014 Winner of Duff Cooper Prize for Other People's Countries
  • 2016 Winner of the Gapper Prize for French Studies, for Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France
  • Longlisted for the 2020 Crime Writers Association Golden Dagger Aaward for Throw Me to the Wolves
  • 2020 Winner of Encore Award for Throw Me to the Wolves[21]


Bibliography
  • T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings (Carcanet Press/Routledge USA, 1998, 2003) ISBN 978-1-85754-722-1
  • New Poetries II, an anthology, edited by Michael Schmidt, Carcanet, 1999, pp. 70–76 ISBN 1-85754-349-1
  • Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre Oxford University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-19-815977-3
  • Symbolism, Decadence and the 'Fin de Siècle': French and European Perspectives (editor) University of Exeter Press, 2000 ISBN 978-0-85989-646-7
  • Anthologie de la Poésie Symboliste et Décadente (editor) Les Belles Lettres (France), 2001 ISBN 978-2-251-44365-2
  • J-K Huysmans' Against Nature (editor) Penguin, 2003 ISBN 978-0-14-044763-7
  • S.Mallarmé For Anatole's Tomb (translator) Carcanet, 2003, ISBN 978-1-85754-636-1
  • Marcel Schwob, Oeuvres (editor) Les Belles Lettres (France), 2003 ISBN 978-2-251-44220-4
  • The Canals of Mars Carcanet, 2004, ISBN 1-85754-772-1
  • Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (editor) Carcanet, 2005, ISBN 1-85754-842-6
  • I canali di Marte edited and translated by Giorgia Sensi, Mobydick, 2006, ISBN 978-88-8178-335-9
  • 19th Century Blues Smith/Doorstop, 2007, ISBN 978-1-902382-88-3
  • Lynette Roberts: Diaries, Letters and Recollections, (editor) Carcanet, 2009, ISBN 978-1-85754-856-3
  • Jilted City Carcanet, 2010, ISBN 978-1-85754-968-3
  • L'età della sedia vuota, (original title Jilted City) ed. and transl. by Giorgia Sensi, Il Ponte del Sale, Rovigo, 2011, ISBN 88-89615-17-6
  • The Last Hundred Days, Seren, 2011, ISBN 978-1-85411-541-6
  • Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory, Jonathan Cape, 2014 ISBN 978-0-224-09830-4
  • Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siecle France: From Anarchism to Action Francaise, OUP, 2015
  • Throw Me to the Wolves, Jonathan Cape, 2019, ISBN 978-1787331464
  • Real Oxford, Seren Books, 2021.
  • Blood Feather, Jonathan Cape, 2023 (Poems)

See also

References
  1. "Candidates". Plaid Cymru. Retrieved 26 May 2019.
  2. "Why the monarchy needs saving - from its admirers". 14 September 2022.
  3. Adrian Tahourdin (24 October 2013). "'The Last Hundred Days'". TLS. Retrieved 6 June 2019.
  4. T E Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet, 1998
  5. For Anatole's Tomb, Carcanet, 2003
  6. Anthologie de la Poésie Symboliste et Décadente, Les Belles Lettres, France, 2001
  7. Marcel Schwob, Œuvres, Les Belles Lettres, France, 2003
  8. J K Huysmans, Against Nature, Penguin, 2003
  9. "A quite extraordinary affair': the impetuous life and free-ranging work of Lynette Roberts' - Patrick McGuinness, The Times Literary Supplement". Carcanet Press. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  10. The poem Daytime Drinking is also published in the Poems on the Vaporetto Archived 2 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine series in Venice, n. 54.
  11. Wales Literature Exchange The Canals of Mars Archived 25 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  12. Patrick McGuinness, Černá skřínka Periplum, 2009. ISBN 978-80-86624-51-8.
  13. 19th Century Blues, Smith/Doorstop Books, 2007
  14. Sean O'Brien, "Jilted City by Patrick McGuinness" in The Guardian, 29 May 2010
  15. L'età della sedia vuota, cura e traduzione di Giorgia Sensi, edizioni Il ponte del sale, Rovigo, 2011
  16. The Age of the Empty Chair, inspired by Monet's painting The Beach at Trouville
  17. James Purdon, "The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness. Ceausescu's Bucharest falls again in a vivid semi-autobiographical novel" in The Guardian 14 August 2011
  18. Jordan, Justine (26 April 2019). "Throw Me to the Wolves by Patrick McGuinness review – memory and murder". The Guardian.
  19. Ministere
  20. "The Last Hundred Days is Wales Book of the Year in English language". 12 July 2012 – via www.bbc.co.uk.
  21. "The Encore Award". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 25 June 2021.
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