SINCLAIR, Iain 1943–

(Iain MacGregor Sinclair)

PERSONAL:

Born June 11, 1943, in Cardiff, Wales; son of Henry MacGregor (a doctor in private practice) and Doris Sinclair; married Annabel Hadman (a schoolteacher), March 4, 1967; children: Farne, William, Madeleine. Education: Attended Cheltenham College, London School of Film Technique, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Courtauld Institute.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—John Parker, MBA Literary Agents Ltd., 45 Fitzroy St., London W1P 5HR, England.

CAREER:

Lecturer, filmmaker, parks gardener, book dealer, and writer. Founder, Albion Village Press.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize, 1992, and Encore Award, 1992, both for Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath.

WRITINGS:

(With Christopher Bamford) An Explanation (play), first produced in Dublin, Ireland, 1963.

(With Christopher Bamford) Chords (play), first produced in Dublin, Ireland, 1964.

Back Garden Poems, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1970.

The Kodak Mantra Diaries: Allen Ginsberg in London, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1971.

Muscat's Würm, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1972.

The Birth Rug, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1973.

Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1975, reprinted with Suicide Bridge, an introduction by Michael Moorcock, and maps by Dave McKean, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Brown Clouds, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1977.

The Penances, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1977.

Suicide Bridge, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1979, reprinted with Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets, an introduction by Michael Moorcock, and maps by Dave McKean, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Fluxions, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1983.

Autistic Poses, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1985.

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (novel), Goldmark (Uppingham, Rutland, England), 1987.

Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal: Selected Poems, 1970-1987, Paladin (London, England), 1989.

Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath (novel), Paladin (London, England), 1991, Random House (New York, NY), 1993.

Jack Elam's Other Eye, Albion Village Press (London, England), 1991.

The Shamanism of Intent: Some Flights of Redemption, Goldmark (Uppingham, Rutland, England), 1991.

Radon Daughters: A Voyage, between Art and Terror, from the Mound of Whitechapel to the Limestone Pavements of the Burren, J. Cape (London, England), 1994.

(Editor) Conductors of Chaos, Picador (London, England), 1996.

Lights Out for the Territory, J. Cape (London, England), 1997.

Slow Chocolate Autopsy: Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London, Phoenix House (London, England), 1997.

The Ebbing of the Kraft, Equipage (Cambridge, England), 1997.

Crash: David Cronenberg's Post-Mortem on J.G. Ballard's 'Trajectory of Fate', British Film Institute (London, England), 1999.

(Coauthor, with Rachel Lichtenstein) Rodinsky's Room (nonfiction), Granta (London, England), 1999.

(Coauthor, with Marc Atkins) Liquid City, Reaktion (London, England), 1999.

Landor's Tower (novel), Granta (London, England), 2001.

London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (nonfiction), Granta (London, England), 2002.

Dining on Stones; or The Middle Ground (novel), Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 2004.

Edge of the Orison (nonfiction), Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 2005.

Author of works under pseudonym Iain MacGregor Sinclair. Series editor, "Paladin Poetry."

SIDELIGHTS:

British writer Iain Sinclair has drawn comparisons to William Burroughs for his dark and hallucinatory explorations of urban London, past and present. Sinclair's best known works, such as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Downriver; or, the Vessels of Wrath, ruminate on violence, disease, and dementia through the eyes of eccentric Londoners and the spirit of the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. Sinclair is also recognized in Britain for his poetry and documentary films, most of which do not share the nihilistic vision of his fiction.

A contributor to the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, observed that, although Sinclair's fiction is dense and demanding, the author "does not object to his novels being classed with horror…. They share [a] vividness, attention to detail, and love of the eccentric and grotesque." White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings introduces a group of phlegmatic rare book dealers and their search for documentation of Jack the Ripper and other Victorian sadists. Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath, one of the author's best known books, is a twelve-segment journey through the depths of London and the dark souls of its denizens. In the Observer, James Saynor declared Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath, "a must for all connoisseurs of heavy-duty wordsmithery…. There can be no doubting the power and singularity of Sinclair's vision." According to Angela Carter in the London Review of Books: " Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath is really a sort of peripatetic biography: Iain Sinclair's adventures at the end of time, at the end of his tether, in a city of the near future with a hallucinatory resemblance to London. The decisive influence on this grisly dystopia is surely the grand master of all dystopias, William Burroughs."

Radon Daughters: A Voyage, between Art and Terror, from the Mound of Whitechapel to the Limestone Pavements of the Burren, continues Sinclair's exploration of the bizarre and horrific, this time through the eyes of a crippled protagonist who seeks illicit doses of radiation from a local hospital. The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers essayist claimed that a central theme of much of Sinclair's fiction "is always London, and the strange things which have taken place there, or do, or may, or will take place." The critic continued: "The sometimes rambling nature of Sinclair's novels, and the repetitive preoccupations, should not distract the would-be reader from the power of his prose and poetry, or the detail of his observations."

Again focusing on stories of unusual Londoners, Sinclair collaborated with Rachel Lichtenstein to create Rodinsky's Room, published in 1999. The two authors used alternating chapters and their own unique voices to present the life of David Rodinsky, a reclusive man who lived for years in the attic of the London synagogue where he worked as caretaker. During his private hours, he lived the life of a scholar. Disappearing unexpectedly one day, he left behind his personal effects, books, records, and more. Twenty years later, Lichtenstein discovered in them the record of a lost European culture. Lichtenstein's personal journal of her explorations of Rodinsky's life contrasts with Sinclair's reflections on the legends surrounding Rodinsky and his East London world. A Publishers Weekly writer noted that the story of Rodinsky's "obscure life, a metaphor of Jewish tragedy and survival, yields a vibrant time capsule." A Tikkun reviewer described it as "a deeply haunting, unusually gripping narrative."

Sinclair turned to fiction again with Landor's Tower, a book that interweaves the story of a historical figure, Walter Savage Landor, with Sinclair's frustrated attempts to write a book about Landor, along with a subplot about booksellers hunting for rare editions. Commenting on the author's unique style, James Sallis wrote in the Review of Contemporary Fiction: "His sentences sweat and huff and fart with the meaning packed onto them." Predicting the book would appeal to Sinclair's fans, Booklist reviewer Michele Leber thought the book contained "gems of insight, wit, and wisdom."

Two major London thoroughfares are featured in London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 and Dining on Stones; or, The Middle Ground. Sinclair used the M25, a road that forms the boundary of London, as a starting point for his free-form reflections on many subjects in the book London Orbital. Sinclair walked along the road as he worked on the book, commenting on the history and character of the localities through which he passed. His writing in London Orbital sometimes gives the impression "of a mind so busy and erudite that prose is almost too clumsy a medium to express its ingenious fancies. Often this can be striking and exhilarating," stated James Delingpole in Spectator. The author echoed his real-life experience in the novel Dining on Stones; or, The Middle Ground, which features a fictional writer, Andrew Norton, walking along the A13 road near London. The twisted plot does not follow conventional logic, but as Hugo Barnacle wrote in New Statesman: "The novel's ostensible settings, despite the minute details of architecture, graffiti and litter, are self-dispelling illusions. The true setting is the constantly changing parallel universe of the writer's mind."

With his 2005 publication Edge of the Orison, Sinclair produced another book "that will be the despair of tidy-minded librarians and the defeat of the Dewey decimal system," stated Ian Irvine in New Statesman. Encompassing the genres of memoir, biography, art theory, and literary criticism, the book also covers subjects as diverse as the Beat writers and the Knights Templar. Irvine advised that Sinclair's "voice is always compelling," as well as "very funny."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 76, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1993, pp. 221-228.

St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998, pp. 537-538.

periodicals

Booklist, August, 2001, Michele Leber, review of Landor's Tower, p. 2091.

Critique, spring, 2002, Wilhelm Emilsson, "Iain Sinclair's Unsound Detectives," p. 271.

Library Journal, November 1, 2002, Sheila Kasperek, review of London Orbital: A Walk around the M25, p. 120.

London Review of Books, March 7, 1991, Angela Carter, review of Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath, pp. 17-18.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May, 2002, James Sallis, review of Landor's Tower, p. 32.

New Statesman, May 24, 2004, Hugo Barnacle, review of Dining on Stones; or, The Middle Ground, p. 55; October 3, 2005, Ian Irvine, review of Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's "Journey out of Essex," p. 53.

New Statesman & Society, March 8, 1991, Michael Moorcock, review of Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath, p. 36.

Observer, March 3, 1991, James Saynor, review of Downriver; or, The Vessels of Wrath, p. 58.

Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2000, review of Rodinsky's Room, p. 64.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2002, James Sallis, review of Landor's Tower, p. 128.

Spectator, March 16, 1991, p. 37; November 2, 2002, James Delingpole, review of London Orbital, p. 59.

Tikkun, January, 2001, review of Rodinsky's Room, p. 60.*