Sarah Bakewell (born 1963) is a British author and professor. She lives in London.[1] She received the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.
Early life
Bakewell was born in the seaside town of Bournemouth, England, where her parents ran a small hotel.[1] When she was five, the family began travelling through India in a camper and continued to do so for two years before settling in Sydney, Australia. There, her father worked as a bookseller and her mother worked as a librarian.[1] As a child, she often wrote,[1] and spent some of her young adulthood working in bookstores.[2]
Bakewell studied philosophy at the University of Essex in England.[1] She embarked on a PhD on philosopher Martin Heidegger, but gave it up to move to London, where she initially found work at a tea-bag factory.[3] Bakewell later completed a post-graduate degree on Artificial Intelligence.[3]
Career
Bakewell began writing again during her job at the Wellcome Library in London as a curator of early printed books, which she began in the early 1990s.[1] She spent a decade at the library, where she came across interesting historical fragments and a pamphlet that would inspire her first book.[3]
The Smart, Bakewell's first book, related the story of an 18th-century forgery trial she came across in the Wellcome collection.[1] In 2002, she quit this job to devote more energy to writing. She published The English Dane, the biography of Danish revolutionary and explorer Jørgen Jørgensen, in 2005.
From 2008 to 2010, Bakewell worked as a part-time cataloger of rare books for the National Trust, cataloging historical book collections around England.[1][3] In 2010 she published How to Live, a biography of 16th century essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.[4] The book received rave reviews, with The Guardian calling it a "superb, spirited introduction to the master."[4]
Humanly Possible: seven hundred years of humanist freethinking, inquiry, and hope (Chatto & Windus, UK; Penguin, US; Knopf; Canada, March 2023) is about many extraordinary individuals throughout history who have put rational inquiry, cultural richness, freedom of thought and a sense of hope at the heart of their lives. ISBN9780735223370[9][10][11][12][13]
The English Dane (Chatto & Windus, 2005; Vintage, 2006) is about 19th-century Danish adventurer Jørgen Jørgensen, a key player in stirring a revolution in Iceland to break from Denmark's control.[1]
The Smart (Chatto & Windus, 2001; Vintage, 2002) is about an 18th-century forgery trial she came across while working at the Wellcome Library.[1]
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