Join us in celebrating the life and work of Edward Thomas at the Edward Thomas Literary Festival 2024.
Matthew Hollis is an award-winning poet, biographer and editor, whose acclaimed account of the final years of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, won the Costa Biography Award in 2012 and was celebrated by the Sunday Times as ‘a bravura critical performance’.
Join Matthew as he guides us through the tumultuous last years of Thomas's life: from the despair that had crippled his civilian days to the self-appreciation that marked his fatal decision to enlist in the British Army in 1915. Drawing upon archive sound recordings and period photography, Matthew will tell the story of Thomas’s literary development and his marriage to Helen, and of the pivotal friendship with Robert Frost, which became the catalyst for Edward Thomas's late but lasting remarkable expression in poetry.
'I read this book entranced, inspired, anxious and grateful and I finished it in tears. It is important and it is wonderful.'
— Carol Ann Duffy.
About Matthew Hollis:
Matthew Hollis is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Biography Award, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022), a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Ground Water, a poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, 2004; Earth House was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry, 2023.
