Non Fiction
Category: Memoir, Non Fiction, Travel
Number of pages: 184
ISBN: 9781781723470
Publication date: July 7, 2016
Price: £9.99
‘Nicholas Murray unleashed his inner poet for his greatest nonfiction book, Crossings. An examination of borders of all kinds – cultural, political, linguistic – it is particularly poignant when he approaches liminal borders such as old age.’ Martina Evans – The Irish Times
‘This impressive collection of short pieces is part travelogue and part meditation on other, metaphysical borders the biographer and poet Nicholas Murray has experienced.’ – The Tablet
Crossings is a book about borders. Though many of the borders it addresses are geographical, encountered on his travels, Nicholas Murray also considers less clearly defined, more abstract borders he has crossed or confronted – cultural, linguistic, social, class, religious, sexual. Whatever kind of border we encounter, they cause us both to think of how see ourselves as individual and as members of a variety of groups. Conversely they also cause us to think about how we consider others – and the ‘otherness’ which results from their being on a different side of a border. Borders are markers of identity and, consequently, formers of societies.
Divided into two unequal parts, Crossings places Murray in the wider world, and locates him in his home. In the longer first section he transports the reader to Spain and North Africa, Gibraltar, Turkey, partitioned Cyprus, the cross roads that is Trieste, Hong Kong and Australia, and takes a trip along the Danube through the contested lands of the Balkans. Along the way Murray writes about Voltaire and Joyce, exile, translation, the North/South divide and the social minefield of speaking at Eton school.
In the shorter second section Murray explores his home patch, which happens to be the border between Wales and England, known as the English (or are they the Welsh?) Marches, a relatively short commute from his other home in multicultural London. Drawing on his long experience living as a kind of outsider on this historic, but also more domestic, border provides a fascinating counterpoint to the people, customs and mores encountered in the first part of the book.
Nicholas Murray
Nicholas Murray is a poet and literary biographer living in Powys. He wrote the first biography of Bruce Chatwin, published by Seren, which was followed by lives of Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley, Andrew Marvell and Franz Kafka and biographical studies of the WW1 poets and the nineteenth century British travellers, then latter being re-issued in 2027 by Eland. Two works of fiction, a book on borders and Real Bloomsbury have all been published by Seren. He has published three books of poetry including Elsewhere: Collected Poems in 2022 and over a dozen poetry pamphlets. He won the Basil Bunting Prize in 2015 and is co-publisher of the award-winning Powys-based poetry pamphlet imprint Rack Press. He has enjoyed collaborating as a poet with the Sage Dance Company at the Bloomsbury Festival and with other composers. His 2016 book on borders, Crossings inspired a string quartet by Cheryl Frances Hoad premiered at the Presteigne Festival and he writes the Free Range Writing Substack. His Instagram account is @rackpress. His freelance reviews and essays have appeared in the TLS, LRB, Guardian, Independent, Literary Review, Slightly Foxed, Planet, New Welsh Review and many others. He is currently Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University.
