Philip Hoare

Philip Hoare on William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love

Philip Hoare is an writer and artist of great range, winning the Baillie Gifford Prize for Leviathan, Or the Whale, assisting in the V & A's touring exhibition 'David Bowie Is,' and curating a retrospective on the filmmaker Dereck Jarman. In his new book, which Olivia Laing praises as 'undoubtedly Hoare' masterpiece,' he turns his sights on William Blake and the iconoclastic legacy he left behind.

In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero - a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.

In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up twentieth-century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.

Philip Hoare is the author of ten books, including Leviathan, or the Whale, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He lives on the south coast of England and swims every day in the sea.