Philip Marsden

Philip Marsden is the author of a number of books of travel, history and fiction. The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians (re-issued 2015) won the Somerset Maugham Award while The Spirit-Wrestlers: and Other Survivors of the Russian Century  (1999) won the Thomas Cook / Telegraph Travel Book of the Year Award. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and he lives in Cornwall with his family and several small boats. RISING GROUND was published by Granta in 2014. 

His new book, THE SUMMER ISLES, was published in early October 2019 by Granta.

Praise for THE SUMMER ISLES (2019):

‘Marvellous… [Marsden’s] book is as sound and well balanced as his old wooden sloop, and its author has his head screwed on… He conveys powerfully the fear and the joy of his new challenge; “the fickle extremes of single-handed sailing”. He does so without concessions to landlubbers, without laborious explanations of what exactly he’s up to. I don’t know what it means to hank on the jib or sweat the halyards, but I know what it is to be borne along by prose as fresh as an Atlantic breeze… I loved The Summer Isles from page one.’ Michael Kerr, Telegraph *****

‘Marsden’s odyssey in his wooden boat, Tsambika, takes him up the western fringe of the archipelago – “Europe’s dreaming frontier” – through a rich territory of real and imagined places. There are memorable historical anecdotes and encounters with local people on the islands he visits… He writes beautifully, and transforms what could easily have been a conventional travel book into something far more evocative and personal: “a sea journey is a passage of the soul”. The harsh coastal landscapes and shifting moods of the sea are vividly described. But what is so memorable and indeed magical is the way he interweaves the imaginary and the real. In these islands at the edge of the Atlantic, staring out into “the endless blue of the west”, he finds a rich tradition of myth, poetry and ancient lore that still speaks to us across the gulf of time.’ PD Smith, Guardian

‘Thrillingly alive… the music of this book’s briny lexis will lull any worries of it being a work of yachtsman geekery. This is a story about sailing, but in many ways it’s not. Marsden sets off from his home in Cornwall for the Summer Isles, off Scotland’s northwest coast, but it’s soon clear he is, as with his previous books, more interested in what happens in the liminal spaces between long-awaited destinations.’ Sarah Barrell, National Geographic

‘The Summer Isles is a gazetteer of toponyms that conjure a scintillating watery world… Marsden is, as previous books have revealed, a lyrical writer who perceives the sea as ‘the conduit for our own restless hopes’. Many descriptive passages are excellent… An element of memoir clings to the pages (Marsden has known the territory for decades), handled with a light touch; this is not a journey-as-redemption, or a saga wrapped round a personal calamity… Marsden makes the landscape his own, and his sense of wonder percolates the paragraphs… I greatly enjoyed this book.’ Sara Wheeler, Spectator

‘How can you not be a little captivated when the island of Inishglora makes its appearance on the page?... Marsden’s lovely book is full of such stories, dredged up from the rich tradition of ancient and medieval literature… Sailing aficionados need not be alarmed, however. There is much talk of halyards and sea-charts in the book, too: geology messes with magnet readings, tillers are gripped in choppy waters, and the roughest stretches of the journey sound terrifying… Best of all are the people Marsden encounters.’ Geographical

‘[Marsden] skirts along the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland, circling and exploring many of the tiny islands that pepper the coastline. This journey forms the central narrative of the book, and it can also be traced pleasingly on the hand-drawn maps at the front. Marsden is steeped in the heroic literary tradition of these places, and in a way his journey does have the feeling of a quest – although he sensibly eschews the clichés of what he calls “gift-shop Celtic”. There is also a subtly expressed emotional depth to his writing, because the Summer Isles have a particular resonance for him: he spent several summers as a young man helping his aunt and uncle on their farm in Sutherland, looking out longingly across the loch to the islands… And there is plenty of rich, romantic writing in this book… I appreciated Marsden’s transparency in explaining that during the months it took him to sail north, his wife was left as a single parent… The freedom to undertake a solo voyage like this is an illusion, created by invisible labour. I wish more writers would acknowledge it.’ Caroline Crampton, i

‘Caught between a physical journey in reality and a world of folklore and legend, [The Summer Isles] takes the reader on a voyage that goes much deeper than most travel books… As he meets different people and passes through various checkpoints, Marsden uncovers a variety of tales which allow him to build up a haunting picture of these shores along the way. Through his descriptive and emotive language, the reader can almost feel the adrenaline as Marsden pushes us to view the sea as a force that demands great respect and a necessary sense of fear. The incredible power of nature is a message that remains prevalent from start to finish… I did feel inspired to don my waterproofs and get out on the water.’ Stephanie Abbot, Scottish Field

Praise for RISING GROUND (2014):

'Marsden is a born writer. Elegance seems as natural to his prose as the breeze from the west to his adopted homeland. He wears his learning lightly, and his curiosity is boundless. It is, however, almost wholly fixed on the past. He writes touchingly and vividly of two 20th-century artists – the blind and deaf poet Jack Clemo, and the painter Peter Lanyon – but he displays no active interest in present-day Cornwall, and his encounters with living people along his way are underpowered. Like other scholarly types, he gives the impression of finding his own time less exciting and rewarding than those days of yore.' Telegraph

'A thought-provoking exploration of Cornish lives and landscapes... [Marsden] writes about [Cornwall] with a historian’s eye and singular sensitivity... While the book’s aim is to discover the spirit of place, what it reveals and celebrates best is the spirit of people – reaching back to neolithic man. He is superb at describing walkers and scholars united in topophilia (love of place): figures in a landscape... But perhaps the most striking thing of all about the book is that its contemporary details seem anachronistic in their ancient context. The modern age seems paper-thin, lightweight, even faintly ludicrous. In Penwith, Marsden observes a poster for salsa courses and another for the Alpha course “Life is Worth Exploring” outside the church hall. The invitations come across as incongruous. It seems clear that exploring this fine book would be the superior alternative with its reminder that it is “diligent attention to the world” that “makes life worth living”.' Guardian 

'[It] is Marsden’s close attention to the immediacy of his experience – the shape of the particular hill, the sound of the curlew’s cry in the early hours, the feel of heather crunching beneath his feet – that keeps him, and us, interested in this journey. And when his own ideas get too speculative he typically takes a scythe to a thicket in his garden or pulls on his walking boots and heads for the hills. By letting go of the attempt to find an epic resolution to the quandaries he has set himself, he settles for occasional moments of lyric apprehension. His nowhere momentarily becomes a somewhere. And as it does, Marsden vividly shows us the importance of particularity as a doorway into inhabiting our deepest understanding of what it means to be a human being walking this earth... Marsden is our apostle here, though a modest one, more poet than preacher, as he invites us to join him in gazing upon a succession of Cornish wonders.' Financial Times 

'Marsden’s references are glittering, from Ethiopia to Mongolia, and by the time he reaches the Scilly Isles the reader has a wonderful sense of how the bass notes of the past sound through soil and site into language and the living. In a reaffirmed United Kingdom this is a timely volume, describing in beautiful prose the opulence of our natural and human fabric... a superb and educative work which should be read everywhere.' Independent