James Lasdun

James Lasdun Poems

James Lasdun Biography

James Lasdun (born 1958) is a British writer who has lived in the United States since 1986. His father was the architect Denys Lasdun. Lasdun was born in London, the son of Susan (Bendit) and Denys Lasdun. Lasdun has written two novels, The Horned Man, 2002, a New York Times Notable Book, and Seven Lies, 2006, which was an Economist Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. He has published four collections of short stories, including The Siege: Selected Stories, the title story of which was adapted for film by Bernardo Bertolucci as Besieged in 1998. His latest collection It's Beginning To Hurt, 2009 was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Library Journal and the Atlantic. With Jonathan Nossiter, Lasdun co-wrote the film Sunday in 1997, based on his story Ate Menos or The Miracle, winning both the Best Feature Award and the Waldo Salt Best Screenplay Award at Sundance. Together they also wrote the next Nossiter fiction feature film Signs and Wonders in 2000 selected for the official selection of the 50th Berlin International Film Festival in 2000. Lasdun has written four books of poetry, one of which, Landscape with Chainsaw, was a finalist for the T S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also selected as a TLS International Book of the Year. His reviews and essays have appeared in Harper's, Granta, the London Review of Books and The Guardian. With his wife, Pia Davis, Lasdun has written two guidebooks dedicated to the combined pleasures of walking and eating: one in Tuscany and Umbria, the other in Provence. He has taught creative writing at Princeton, NYU, the New York State Writers' Institute, the New School, Columbia University and Bennington College. In 2013, he confessed that he was the Reader who turned down the Jane Somers novel (pseudonymously written by Doris Lessing, Nobel laureate for Literature) submitted to Jonathan Cape publishers, in the New Yorker "Page Turner" blog 23 July 2013. Critical appraisals of his work include reviews by James Wood in the Guardian and by Gabriele Annan in the New York Review of Books.)

The Best Poem Of James Lasdun

The Blight

What's there to say? We didn't care for him much,
and you can't exactly commiserate
with someone you don't just not love
but almost (admit it) hate.
So the news just hung over us
like the dud summer weather we'd had—
rain since June, the lawn sodden,
garden a bog, all slugs, late blight so bad
our sickened Beefsteak vines, our Sweet One Hundreds,
San Marzanos, the lot,
yellowed half black before the fruit had set,
which, when it did, began to bloat and rot
before it ripened—but like I say
(and not to speak ill of the dead)
we just didn't care for him,
which is probably all there is to be said.

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