Hamish Hamilton nets Barkham’s biography of Roger Deakin

Hamish Hamilton has netted Patrick Barkham’s biography of author and environmentalist Roger Deakin, written with the support of Deakin’s literary executor, Robert Macfarlane.   

Simon Prosser, publishing director, acquired world volume rights, including audio and serial, to The Swimmer from agent Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown Associates, now at CAA. It will publish on 25th May 2023. 

Deakin’s Waterlog (Vintage) and Wildwood (Hamish Hamilton) are described by the publisher as some “of the most exceptional and influential books of modern nature writing”. It continued: “Deakin led a wildly unconventional life, brought to the page with unique vivacity in the words of Roger himself, as assembled and channelled by Patrick, and in the recollections of a wide cast of people who knew him.” 

Prosser said: “I often think of Roger, and I miss him greatly. So working on this book with Patrick has been a particular pleasure – a way of revisiting the years when I knew him. Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this book, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues, lovers and neighbours. Delving deep into Roger Deakin’s library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings, published work and early drafts, to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages. To read this book is to listen in to a dream conversation between a writer and those who knew him intimately.” 

Barkham said: “Roger is one of the most interesting members of the most distinctive and compelling generation that ever lived – those who came of age in the 1960s and brought about a cultural, sexual, musical and ultimately environmental revolution. It has been a joy to inhabit Roger’s world and listen to the memories of so many of his generation. I hope I’ve given true voice to the spirit, the love and the struggles of Roger and his friends here.” 

Macfarlane also commented: “I was lucky to know Roger in the closing years of his life; he became my friend, mentor and inspiration, until his far-too-early death. Reading Patrick’s brilliant biography of this remarkable man, I felt both that I was meeting again the Roger I knew, and also encountering a Roger I never met. The Swimmer is a wonderful, original achievement; teeming with stories, glittering with images, and experimental in form and tone.  The narrative form Patrick has chosen allows Roger’s own voice to sing through and also introduces us to a chorus of voices, memories and perspectives of those who knew Roger over the course of his wild and various life.”