Alexander Masters
Enjoy a Monstrous Moonshine cocktail with award-winning author, Alexander Masters, as he talks about his upcoming book. Glowing under ultraviolet light and full of dry ice, Alexander will be mixing up “a stinker of a cocktail” which is sure to compliment the conversation.
Alexander is an author, illustrator and homeless worker. His 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.
“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
“Stuart does not like the manuscript. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort to write a biography of this annoying man who now sits squeezed into my armchair, his ugly mug pushed forward in objection.”
Extract from Stuart: a Life Backwards.
