Author(s): Wroe

General | FT Books of the Year 2023

A dazzlingly original blend of memoir, essay, biography and poetry, reflecting on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page, by the acclaimed biographer and obituarist I think of my work as catching souls. It is soul that I go looking for. Or, to put it another way, real life. A dazzlingly original blend of memoir, essay, biography and poetry, reflecting on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page, by the acclaimed biographer and obituarist 'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In Lifescapes, the acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life- a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls. In a dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, she reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing this phenomenon on the page. Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied or merely glimpsed through windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after. From biography Wroe moves to intimations of a far greater life- one encountered in childhood, in artistic creation, dreams, birth and death. Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.