Blake Morrison

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Photograph: Charlotte Knee

Books

Associate: Eli Keren

Film, TV & Theatre

Associate Agent : Olivia Martin

Books

Born in Skipton, Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is perhaps best known for his hugely acclaimed memoirs. He is also a critic, journalist, librettist and poet. He teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, and lives in South London with his family.

For film, theatre and TV enquiries, please contact Charles Walker at United Agents. 

 

Current Publication

TWO SISTERS - The Borough Press - Feb 2023

‘She’s gone, that’s all, and though there’s no retrieving her I’d like to make sense of who she was and what she became. It wasn’t just that she changed over time. She could change from day to day. Drink made it worse but the origins went deeper. You never knew which you’d get, the kind and loving Gill or her doppelgänger. Two sisters.’

Blake Morrison has lost a sister and a half-sister in recent years. Both are the subjects of this remarkable and heart-breaking memoir, along with a forensic examination of sibling relationships in history and literature.

Blake’s sister Gill struggled with alcoholism for a large part of her life, and her shocking death is the starting point for Two Sisters. Blake returns to their childhood to search for the origins of her later difficulties, and in doing so unearths the story behind his half-sister, Josie.

As he unravels these narratives, Blake deals movingly in the guilt and shame that will be familiar to every person who has struggled with addiction in their family. He is unflinching in doing so, and the result is a book which provides testament to that common struggle, as well as acknowledging the complex, hidden forces on which all our lives are based.

Two Sisters is the extraordinary new memoir from the chronicler of human frailty, Blake Morrison.

 

Praise for TWO SISTERS

‘A book at once bold, magnanimous, heart-breaking and riveting…’ HOWARD JACOBSON

‘Beautiful. Affecting. Erudite.’ SUSIE ORBACH

‘A ground-breaking confessional memoir’ BBC Books of 2023

‘Pungent, disturbing, entirely unforgettable’ THE TIMES

‘Harrowing, candid and clear-eyed, unflinchingly honest and self-critical. Two sad stories. The strangeness of families and the weight of the past. The guilt of being OK’ NICCI GERRARD

‘Few writers can claim to have affected the literary landscape like Blake Morrison… Two Sisters is not an easy book to read, but it is a bracingly honest one’ MAIL ON SUNDAY, Book of the Week

‘A wonderfully heartfelt and tender thing: delicate and unstinting and clear-eyed’ OBSERVER, Book of the Week

‘Engrossing’ SPECTATOR

‘A beautiful, brave and brutal memoir that does not shy away from hard truths’ THE TIMES

‘An acute, wonderfully adroit book, overflowing with sharp yet compassionate observations about human nature’ INDEPENDENT

‘Blake Morrison is a writer who tenderly and relentlessly lifts every stone, and the stones beneath, searching for the roots of human feelings and human relations, and revealing them to the reader’ LOUISA YOUNG

‘Affecting… it could help those who have lost a sibling’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘True to a complex, many-layered grief’ TLS

'painful, hesitant, honest' - Daily Mail

 

Previous Fiction Publication

THE EXECUTOR - Chatto & Windus - March 2018

What matters most: marriage or friendship? fidelity or art? the wishes of the living or the talents of the dead? 

Matt Holmes finds himself considering these questions sooner than he thinks when his friend, the poet Robert Pope, dies unexpectedly. Rob had invited Matt to become his literary executor at their annual boozy lunch, pointing out that, at 60, he was likely to be around for some time yet. And Matt, having played devotee and apprentice to ‘the bow-tie poet’ for so long, hadn’t the heart (or the gumption) to deny him.

Now, after a frosty welcome from his widow, Matt sits at Rob’s rosewood desk and ponders his friend’s motives. He has never understood Rob’s conventional life with Jill, who seems to have no interest in her late husband’s work. But he soon finds himself in an ethical minefield, making shocking and scabrous discoveries that overturn everything he thought he knew about his friend. As Jill gets to work in the back garden, Matt is forced to weigh up the merits of art and truth. Should he conceal what he has found or share it? After all, it’s not just Rob’s reputation that could be transformed forever…

Bestselling novelist and poet Blake Morrison creates a biting portrait of competitive male friendship, sexual obsession and the fragile transactions of married life. The Executor innovatively interweaves poetry and prose to form a gripping literary detective story.

 

Praise for THE EXECUTOR - Chatto & Windus - March 2018

"This is a novel of multi-level brilliance, which offers a smart, funny mystery built around ethical concerns over privacy and biography, while casting a beady eye on workplace politics and male midlife crises." (Daily Mail)

"The Executor is a cunningly literary novel… not just a mystery story but a vivid anthology of pastiche poetry. It is also a searching morality tale on the rival claims of art and truth." (The Sunday Times)

"A clever, neatly constructed mystery." (Mail on Sunday, The Best New Fiction)

"A dark and compelling tale of what we leave behind us when we die." (The Guardian)

"A pleasing and very satisfying novel … Blake Morrison both excites such curiosity, and satisfies it … The unravelling of the novel’s moral perplexity is ingenious and persuasive." (The Scotsman)

"Morrison is a delight to read." (The Independent)

 

Previous Poetry Collection

SHINGLE STREET - Chatto & Windus - February 2015

‘A cul-de-sac, a dead-end track,

A sandbanked strand to sink a fleet,

A bay, a bar, a strip, a trap,

A wrecking ground, that’s Shingle Street.’

Blake Morrison’s first two collections, Dark Glasses (1985) and The Ballad of a Yorkshire Ripper(1987) established him as one of our most inventive and accomplished contemporary poets.

In his first full-length collection for nearly thirty years, Shingle Street sees a return to the form with which he started his career. Set along the Suffolk coast, the opening poems address a receding world – an eroding landscape, ‘abashed by the ocean’s passion’. But coastal life gives way to other, more dangerous, vistas: a wave unleashes a flood-tide of terror; a sequence of topical poems lays bare pressing political issues; while elsewhere portraits of the past bring forth the dear and the departed.

Beneath the surface of this collection is an undertow of loss: a piercing examination of change amid a shifting world. Ardent and elegiac, and encompassing an impressive range of mood and method, this is a timely offering from a poet of distinct talents.

Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2018

Chatto & Windus

What matters most: marriage or friendship? fidelity or art? the wishes of the living or the talents of the dead? Matt Holmes finds himself considering these questions sooner than he thinks when his friend, the poet Robert Pope, dies unexpectedly. Rob had invited Matt to become his literary executor at their annual boozy lunch, pointing out that, at 60, he was likely to be around for some time yet. And Matt, having played devotee and apprentice to ‘the bow-tie poet’ for so long, hadn’t the heart (or the gumption) to deny him. Now, after a frosty welcome from his widow, Matt sits at Rob’s rosewood desk and ponders his friend’s motives. He has never understood Rob’s conventional life with Jill, who seems to have no interest in her late husband’s work. But he soon finds himself in an ethical minefield, making shocking and scabrous discoveries that overturn everything he thought he knew about his friend. As Jill gets to work in the back garden, Matt is forced to weigh up the merits of art and truth. Should he conceal what he has found or share it? After all, it’s not just Rob’s reputation that could be transformed forever… Bestselling novelist and poet Blake Morrison creates a biting portrait of competitive male friendship, sexual obsession and the fragile transactions of married life. The Executor innovatively interweaves poetry and prose to form a gripping literary detective story.

2010

Chatto & Windus

A literary yet gripping, humorous yet intense, troubling yet beautiful tale of jealousy and revenge, featuring a classic unreliable and delusional narrator. It begins with a surprising phone call from Ian’s friend from uni, Ollie, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, to join Ollie and his longtime partner, Daisy, for a holiday weekend at the seaside. In precise and vivid prose that reads like a psychological thriller, Blake Morrison brilliantly conveys the stifling atmosphere of a remote cottage in the hottest days of summer. Rivalries between Ian and Ollie, and Ian’s lust Ian for Daisy – who he met first in university before Ollie seduced her away - simmer beneath congenial yet charged chit-chat over meals and wine, and Ian and Ollie resurrect a nearly forgotten bet they had made with each other as students. Each day becomes a series of challenges for higher and higher stakes at golf, tennis, cycling, and swimming. At the same time, Ian plots how to win the love of Daisy and sets in motion actions that will have irreversible and fatal consequences.

THE LAST WEEKEND is a perfectly crafted page-turner and a clever homage to Othello, which is also original and unpredictable. It is surprisingly different from Blake Morrison’s previous acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, and advances his reputation as one of Britain’s most intriguing and talented authors.

2007

Chatto & Windus

Beneath the entertaining domestic canvas and the bright, familiar world of Blair's Britain, there is a dark undertow of public and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives. A tale of five people, two rivers, and many Englands, metropolitan and rural, black and white, is gloriously readable and brimming with art and life.

2000

Chatto & Windus

Blake Morrison's praised first novel is a historical fiction about the man who invented the printing press and thereby revolutionised the culture of the book in Christian Europe. Around 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose invention of moveable metal type was to change the written word for ever and alter the course of history itself. Johann Gutenberg died 60 years later, robbed of his business, his printing presses and, so he thought, of his immortality.

Non-Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2002

Chatto & Windus

This is the startling and touching story of Morrison's mother. She kept many things from him, not least the fact that she never told him that before becoming Kim Morrison, she had previously been Agnes O’Shea, daughter of sizeable Irish family. As he set out to find the facts behind this deceptively quiet Kerry girl who had worked as a doctor in 40s Dublin (and subsequently in British hospitals during the war), he discovered that she had totally reinvented her personality. But the seemingly conventional housewife and mother she had elected to become was only part of the story. We are told of an all-consuming love affair during the war; we are given a strong and vivid portrait of everyday life in the hospitals and RAF training camps of the period. Most of all, we are taken into the world of a remarkable woman. Kim Morrison is an unsung heroine of a time increasingly distant from our own world.

1998

Granta

This is a collection of Blake Morrison's stories and journalism written from 1992 to 1997, examining childhood, relationships between men and women, the public and often fictitious accounts of writers' lives, and assorted aspects of English life and letters. Pieces include a look at the author's own dreams of becoming a football player and a profile of Ted Hughes.

1997

Gollancz

People have almost become desensitized to random murder. It is often explained away by madness, sexual fantasy or rejection. One murder in recent times reduced every person to silence: the abduction and beating to death of a helpless infant by two ten-year-old boys in the Jamie Bulger case. How and why did two innocent boys kill another? Is childhood innocence a myth? And what punishment could fit such a crime, assuming that children are fit to stand trial for murder? Blake Morrison went to the trial in Preston, and discovered a sad ritual of condemnation with two bewildered children at the centre. He looked for possible explanations in the boys' families, their dreary environment, their fantasies, their exposure to violent films. He evokes the worst feats of parents through candid and raw memories of his relations with his own children, and delves into his own childhood to reveal the worst thing he has ever done, to show how easy it is to go along with cruelty.

1993

Granta

An extraordinary portrait of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement. Becoming a bestseller, it inspired a whole genre of confessional memoirs.

Poetry

Publication DetailsNotes
2012

Litfest

Blake Morrison's A Discoverie of Witches contains poems both old and new which give voice to a range of characters involved in the Lancashire Witch trials of 1612: from children who bore witness against their own mothers to the hangman who carried out his job loyally and efficiently. Linking past and present they explore the dark, beautiful Pennine landscapes where Blake Morrison grew up, the kind of places where the natural seems to meet and merge with the supernatural, especially after dusk.

1999

Chatto & Windus

This selection brings together new and previously unpublished poems by Blake Morrison.

BALLAD OF THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER

1987

Chatto & Windus

DARK GLASSES

1984

Chatto & Windus

Morrison's first full-length poetry collection was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the Somerset Maugham Prize.

Film, TV & Theatre

Other

ProductionCompanyNotes

AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER?

BELONGINGS

2009

BBC Northern Ireland

BICYCLE THIEVES

Kudos/ Channel 4

Contemporary version of Sophocles' tragedy

Northern Broadsides

DR OX'S EXPERIMENT

Kudos/ BBC

DR OX'S EXPERIMENT

ENO

ELEPHANT & CASTLE

Aldeburgh Festival

KINDERTOTENLIEDER

Lyric Theatre Hammersmith

OEDIPUS

Northern Broadsides

SHINGLE STREET

Vanson/ Channel 4

THE CRACKED POT

West Yorkshire Playhouse / Northern - Broadsides

THE MAN WITH TWO GAFFERS

Northern Broadsides / Theatre Royal York

WATER LENS

2009

BBC Northern Ireland