MEMOIR OF A POET

A prolific author of novels, poetry collections, plays, biographies and translations, Elaine Feinstein is one of the towering literary figures of the last few decades. In this, her first memoir, she tells the story of her journey from a Jewish childhood in Leicester into the undergraduate world of post-war Cambridge, the excitement of friendships in the literary world and the tensions of a poet’s writing life inside a long and often painful marriage.

This book, however, is not only the intimate memoir of one of Britain’s greatest poets and novelists: it is also the story of a rapidly changing country and of an entire generation of authors. Told with the precision of a biographer and the finesse of a poet, and peppered with witty literary anecdotes, It Goes with the Territory is an absorbing read from beginning to end. Born in Bootle, Lancashire, Elaine Feinstein has written fifteen novels, nineteen collections of poetry, as well as several biographies and radio plays. Her biography Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001) was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Prize. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Appointed to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, she has served as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and has been chairman of the judges for the T. S. Eliot Prize.