Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

"The overall winner of the Baillie Gifford was another literary biography, about the British poet John Donne (1572-1631). It’s called Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell . Rundell is a children’s author who also specializes in Renaissance literature and makes the case that Donne should be as widely feted as William Shakespeare, his contemporary. She writes, “Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, part from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love’.” As she notes: “This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism.”"

"Here in the UK, it was a biography of the early modern English poet, John Donne (1572-1631) that won the country’s prestigious nonfiction prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize (known as the Samuel Johnson Prize until 2015). Donne’s meditations on the meaning of life and death speak to us across the centuries, in poems like “Death Be Not Proud” and passages that remind us that “No Man is An Island,/Entire of itself…Send not to know/For whom the bell tolls,/It tolls for thee.” In Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell , a children’s author who is also a Renaissance literature specialist, conveys not only the ups and downs of Donne’s life, but her passion for his poetry. Other prizewinning books in the general nonfiction category include South to America by Imani Perry , which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Perry is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and it’s a reflective book about a trip to the southern United States, starting in the historically significant town of Harpers Ferry. Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott , tracing the life of a homeless girl in New York City over many years, won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. It’s hard to believe, but amidst New York’s enormous wealth, there are 22,000 homeless children."

"I’ve always loved a literary biography , but you don’t get quite so many of them now. It’s difficult, isn’t it, when you’re approaching the life of somebody? Almost always there’s been a previous biography, and it’s difficult to write one that really says something different and brings a new perspective. This one absolutely does and does so brilliantly. I love a book which then sends you on to other books. This is one where you think, ‘Right. I need to tackle John Donne’s poetry.’ We all know “No man is an island” and a few other bits but she really makes you want to go to his work—or return to it if you haven’t looked at it for a long time. It’s just wonderful. She writes brilliantly. You feel her erudition and her turn of phrase is just so unexpected and fluent. She puts forward ideas about his poetry. He’s clearly one of her passions as a writer, that comes across very strongly, and she gives all the reasons why she thinks he should be much more widely read. Donne was almost a direct contemporary of Shakespeare’s, but Shakespeare’s reputation is worldwide. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s a wonderful conclusion, where she’s saying why we should all read John Donne now. It’s about how death is always here and we have to confront it, but how doing so makes life absolutely fantastic. In a sense, that’s what his work was about. He was always living in the shadow of death, because of the times he lived in—the plague and the persecution of Catholics (he was born a Catholic). Later he was a man of the church. Death was ever present in those times. You don’t necessarily get life for very long, and you have to hold onto it. It’s quite a modern way of looking at it. I just love the way she writes. It’s not like anybody else, I think. She’s extraordinary, Katherine Rundell, a Renaissance woman. Part of our best books of 2022 series."