Home is where the heart, or the hat, is, most of the time. However, it might also reside where the pigeon loft sits, or thousands of miles away, i.e., precisely where you're not. In deeply personal explorations of what and how it means to belong to a place, to other people and to a creative purpose, essayists Joanna Pocock and Jon Day will explore the worlds both local and distant conjured and conjoined in their acclaimed new books, respectively Surrender and Homing. From the vastness of Montana to the streets, parks and waterways of east London, they will tease out the myriad threads of being from which we weave a sense of enduring and viable identity and, if the weather is with us, Jon will release his homing pigeons outside to close the conversation.
Jon Day is a British writer, critic and academic. He was educated at St johns College, Oxford and now lectures at Kings College London. His essays and reviews have appeared in in the London Review of Books, n+1, the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian. He is also a regular fiction critic for The Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times and writes about art for Apollo magazine.
Day’s first book, Cyclogeography, a philosophical memoir about the years he spent as a London bicycle courier, was published in 2015 to great acclaim. His second, Homing’ was published in 2019. He was a judge for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and 2019 Wellcome Book Prize.
https://www.johnmurraypress.co.uk/titles/jon-day/homing/9781473635395/
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender , won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in May 2019. Blending memoir with reportage, criticism with nature writing, Surrender explores the changing landscape of the American West, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. It will be published in Canada in 2019 and in the U.S. in 2020. Her writing has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Granta Online, The London Sunday Independent, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine, Tank, 3:AM and the Dark Mountain online edition. She teaches Prose Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction at the University of the Arts, London.
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/surrender