Carcanet secures essays on intellectual and emotional survival from Bamforth  

Carcanet has secured Zest: Essays in the Art of Living, a collection of “digressive and droll" writing on intellectual and emotional survival from Iain Bamforth. 

Founder and managing director Michael Schmidt acquired world rights directly from the author. The collection will be published in July 2022.  

Bamforth is a doctor who has written extensively about medicine in titles such as A Doctor’s Dictionary (Carcanet), The Body in the Library (Verso) and Scattered Limbs (Galileo). 

The publisher wrote: “Following on the wide-ranging explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writing in Zest delves into the ancient conundrum, made explicit by Socrates: there can be no explicit guide to the art of living, because imitation precludes the individuality of the life to be lived. 

“It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, flavours and musicians into the world of Zest – how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth’s sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore.”