Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography
- Artist: Mervyn Peake
- Published: 2009
- Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd, London
- Edition: -
- Format: Paperback
- Height: 21cm
- Pages: 300
- Illustrations: Includes black & white illustrations
£14.99
Add to basketMervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography
Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies is the result of many years of research into Peake¹s life and work. It follows Peake, the son of missionary parents, from China to art school in London and his time in an artists' colony in the Channel Islands. It covers in detail his experiences in the army during the Second World War an unhappy period during which he wrote Titus Groan and the huge influence that his visit to the newly liberated concentration camp at Belsen had on his work. The next ten years of his life were without doubt his most productive but by the mid-1950s he was beginning to show signs of the degenerative illness that eventually killed him in 1968.
In a revised version of his acclaimed Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies Book in paperback, G. Peter Winnington examines the novels, poems, illustrations and plays and discusses how Peake¹s life and experiences were channelled through his unique imagination into his work. This new edition also features photographs, paintings and drawings specially released for this 2009 edition by the Mervyn Peake Estate.
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Artists Biography
Mervyn Peake was born in China in 1911 of medical missionary parents. He began to draw, paint and write stories at an early age and his first book of poems, Shapes and Sounds, was published in 1941.
Peake is probably best known for his Titus novels — Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone — but other well known poetry collections include: The Glassblowers and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb.
Peake married Maeve Gilmore in 1937 and was later awarded the W.H. Heinemann Foundation Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Mervyn Peake died after suffering a long illness in 1968.
