Alexander Masters
After the success of last year’s Monstrous Moonshine event – where he mixed up “a stinker of a cocktail” (dry ice and all) to compliment the conversation about his latest book – award-winning author, illustrator and homeless worker Alexander Masters will be returning to Port Eliot for what promises to be another fascinating and hilarious show.
Alexander’s first book, Stuart: a Life Backwards, was a Sunday Times bestseller, the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the biography category. The book, which he also illustrated, is an especially moving biography detailing the true story of Stuart Shorter, a person nobody wanted to know – the nutter, the beggar, the addict, the offender. Alexander was working in a hostel for the homeless to support his PhD in the Philosophy of Quantum Physics when he met Stuart. The two of them form an unlikely relationship and the story unfolds – on Stuart’s request – backwards.
A dramatisation of the story was shown on BBC2 last autumn.
“He has, without patronising, given a voice to the ‘underclass’; at the same time, without preaching, he shows us the value of even the most damaged of human lives. A powerful book, humane, instructive and entirely original.”
The Sunday Telegraph
“A bitterly funny book”
The Guardian
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