Iain Sinclair: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Sinclair, Iain, 1943- Title: Iain Sinclair Papers Dates: 1882-2009 (bulk 1960s-2008) Extent: 135 document boxes, 8 oversize boxes (osb) (56.7 linear feet), 23 oversize folders (osf), 15 computer disks Abstract: The papers of British writer Iain Sinclair consist of drafts of works, research material, juvenilia, notebooks, personal and professional correspondence, business files, financial files, works by others, ephemera, and electronic files. They document Sinclair’s prolific and diverse career, from running his own press to his wide range of creative output including works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, edited anthologies, screenplays, articles, essays, reviews, and radio and television contributions. Call Number: Manuscript Collection MS-4930 Language: English; some French, German, and Italian Access: Open for research. 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Administrative Information Acquisition: Purchases, 2004, 2008 (R15236, 2008-09-08-P) Processed by: Joan Sibley and Daniela Lozano, 2016-2017 Repository: The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center 2 Sinclair, Iain, 1943- Manuscript Collection MS-4930 Biographical Sketch Iain MacGregor Sinclair was born June 11, 1943 in Cardiff, Wales, to Henry and Doris Sinclair, and grew up in Maesteg, a former mining town outside of Cardiff. He attended Cheltenham College and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School) before enrolling at Trinity College in Dublin where he served as the editor of the student literary magazine, Icarus. While at Trinity College he met Anna Hadman and they married in 1967. They purchased a house in Hackney, a borough of London, in 1969, with money Sinclair earned from his film documenting Allen Ginsberg’s visit to London, Ah! Sunflower (1967), made for German television. Their first child, Farne, was born in 1972, their second, William, in 1975, and their third, Madeleine, in 1980. After moving to London, Sinclair worked various jobs including teacher, cigar roller, brewery barrel roller, dockyard laborer, and churchyard and cemetery gardener. In 1970, he started his own press, Albion Village Press, and published small editions of his works including the poetry books Muscat’s Würm (1972) and The Birth Rug (1973), as well as The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971) which chronicles the making of Ah! Sunflower. He also published works by other British writers including Brian Catling, Tony Lowes, J. H. Prynne, Peter Riley, and Chris Torrance. While working as a laborer in east London with Catling, Sinclair became interested in six churches there designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Sinclair believed there was a mythological significance to their locations and this became the subject of his long poem, Lud Heat, published by Albion Village Press in 1975. Suicide Bridge followed in 1979 and both are considered Sinclair’s most important poetry books and were later published together by Vintage in 1995 and by Granta in 1998. Sinclair’s poetry aligned with the counter culture and post-Beat poetry of the 1960s and established him as a member of a poetic avant-garde movement taking place in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s sometimes referred to as the British Poetry Revival. Sinclair spent the late 1970s and early 1980s working as a bookseller in addition to writing. This provided the idea and characters for his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, published in 1987, which was the sole runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize and helped launch Sinclair’s literary career as a novelist. By the 1990s, he was making his living as a writer, receiving frequent commissions for essays from publications such as London Review of Books and the Guardian, and publishing various works including the novel Downriver (1991), which was awarded the Encore Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1991. Other works from this decade include the poetry book Jack Elam’s Other Eye (1991), the novel Radon Daughters (1994), the edited anthology Conductors of Chaos (1996), and two collaborative non-fiction works, Liquid City (1999) with photographer Marc Atkins, and Rodinsky’s Room (1999) with Rachel Lichtenstein. Sinclair also served as poetry editor at Paladin in the early 1990s, publishing fellow British Poetry Revival poets including Catling, Torrance, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, and Barry MacSweeney. In 1997, Sinclair published a collected volume of essays about his walks around London, 3 Sinclair, Iain, 1943- Manuscript Collection MS-4930 In 1997, Sinclair published a collected volume of essays about his walks around London, Lights Out for the Territory. Documenting the changes the city was going through as the New Labour party was taking over from the Tories and the effect that new power and money was having on the city, it became an instant bestseller. It is the first in a trilogy of works based on city walks along with London Orbital (2002) and Edge of the Orison (2005). In London Orbital Sinclair documents his walk around the M25, the 117-mile motorway that encircles London, while in Edge of the Orison, he recreates the poet John Clare’s 80-mile walk from Essex, where he escaped from an asylum, to his home in Northborough. This process of taking walks throughout London as a way of writing about the city and involving historical figures such as John Clare, Jack the Ripper, and Arthur Conan Doyle, led to Sinclair’s work being associated with psychogeography, an approach to geography in which the influence of place on emotions is explored. In addition to writing, Sinclair continued to make films. The Cardinal and the Corpse, made with Chris Petit in 1992, is based on sinister dealings of the book trade, and The Falconer, a collaboration with Petit and sculptor Steve Dilworth from 1997, is a semi-fictional documentary about British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. A film version of London Orbital, also made with Petit, who drove the motorway while Sinclair walked, was released with that book. He is also a frequent contributor to BBC programs and has organized various exhibitions and events around London. Sinclair continues to live and work in Hackney. More recent works include Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), Ghost Milk (2011) and American Smoke (2014). Sources: In addition to material found in the collection, the following sources were used: "Iain Sinclair." British Council Literature, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/iain-sinclair (accessed 23 February 2017). "Iain Sinclair." Contemporary Authors Online, http://galenet.galegroup.com (accessed 23 February 2017). Janes, Daniel Marc. "Iain Sinclair: A Life in Film." Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 February 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/iain-sinclair-life-film#! (accessed 27 February 2017). Jeffries, Stuart. "On the road." The Guardian, 23 April 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14 (accessed 27 February 2017). Sheppard, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Devon, U.K.: Northcote House Publishers, 2007. "Sinclair, Iain." The Literary Encyclopedia, 7 November 2002. 4 Sinclair, Iain, 1943- Manuscript Collection MS-4930 Scope and Contents The papers of British writer Iain Sinclair consist of drafts of works, research material, juvenilia, notebooks, personal and professional correspondence, business files, financial files, works by others, ephemera, and electronic files. They document Sinclair’s prolific and diverse career, from running his own press to his wide range of creative output including works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, edited anthologies, screenplays, articles, essays, reviews, and radio and television contributions. The papers are organized into five series: I. Literary Activities, 1882-2009 (bulk 1970-2008), undated; II. Correspondence, 1957-2008, undated; III. Career and Personal Papers, 1950-2008, undated; IV. Works by Others, 1968-2008, undated; and V. Printed Materials, 1973-2008, undated. The Ransom Center acquired the papers in two separate acquisitions in 2004 and 2008. Except in a few cases, the material lacked an arrangement or organizational system. Many items that were not related to each other were grouped into envelopes that were either unlabeled or labeled with only some of their contents, though the labels were often vague, such as "drafts." These items were separated in order to be filed with their respective project or topic, and the original envelope, or a photocopy of it, was kept with the item even when the description on the envelope did not include or was not necessarily indicative of said item.