House Sparrow swoops for Derek Jarman's sole narrative fiction work

Prototype imprint House Sparrow Press is to posthumously publish Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, a short story by the late artist and film-maker Derek Jarman. 

The publisher acquired world rights for the text and audio from the estate of Derek Jarman.

The story, which is thought to be Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction, will be published on 15th November 2022, in what would have been his 80th year. The publication will also feature facsimile images of drafts of the story from Jarman’s archive, and will be accompanied by a link to an exclusive audio recording of the author reading the story in full. An afterword is provided by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen.

Written in 1971, the text is written in "a surreal, fable-like, lyrical tale – fairytale meets literary acid trip road movie", according to the publisher.

It follows the journey of a blind young king and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. They set out "from Fargo, through the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway, picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, encountering characters with names like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an emperor who ‘smiles with the art of mirrors’ and a sphinx with the words ‘Silence is Golden’ written in her eyes". 

Jess Chandler and Gareth Evans, publishers of House Sparrow Press, which is an imprint of Prototype, said: "The opportunity to publish this surreal, enchanting, poetic story, which so few of Jarman’s admirers have ever had the chance to read, is a great privilege. It is rich with the style, imagery and beauty of his later work, and a fascinating insight into the development of his filmic sensibility. It is haunted by the spectre of the current climate crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature and the reckless consumption of modernity. A formal anomaly in Jarman’s oeuvre, it nonetheless echoes through his later work."