Portrait of Edmund de Waal
Reading List
Edmund de Waal
Ceramic Artist and Author
Edmund de Waal is an English potter and writer who makes installations of porcelain vessels, usually grouped in vitrines and arranged as much for the intervals between them as for the objects themselves.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) traces a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke through five generations of his family, the Ephrussis, from Paris and Vienna to the Anschluss and Tokyo. It won the Costa Biography Award. The White Road (2015) followed porcelain itself to its sources in China, Dresden and Cornwall, and Letters to Camondo (2021) is written to a neighbour of his ancestors.
His work is held by the V&A, the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Matsuo Bashō
“You don’t get the density of the language, because when you read haiku [in Japanese] you also see the Japanese characters – which are dense with visual meaning as well as with literal meaning. But it’s still worth it. You don’t have to learn Japanese to enjoy Basho. They are wonderful poems.” — via Interview, May 2012
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens
“I absolutely loved Stevens when I first read him. There’s something at the heart of his poems which is very abstract. He’s dealing with issues about what’s real and what’s imagined, and how you reconstruct the world endlessly through your imagination. They are very beautiful poems and poems that you can reread endlessly, because they are really about imagination and being in the world. They’re also odd poems.” — via Interview, May 2012
Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald
“But you know what: I cannot sum up Austerlitz. I refuse to sum it up. It refuses to be summarised. What I will say about it is that I read it in the English translation, and then I read it in German, and I was absolutely amazed because it has the feeling even in German of being a book in translation. It has a cadence to it which is really intriguing, and which is something to do with being a book about Europe.” — via Interview, May 2012
Illuminations
by Walter Benjamin
“Another of his books, Passagenwerk [The Arcades Project], is the greatest book about Paris in the 19th century that there is. But he’s also completely brilliant on toys, on photographs and on books. What I absolutely love about him is the feeling of someone who cares about the world of things, and how things work with people – but he’s also a philosopher, which is very unusual.” — via Interview, May 2012
