Iain Sinclair – Year of election 2009

Iain Sinclair was a teacher, labourer, second-hand bookdealer, poet and film-maker before he became known as the prose laureate of Hackney, the east London borough where he settled in 1969. But it was not until the publication of his novel Downriver (1991), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award, that he discovered general acclaim.

“Staying in the same Hackney house for 40 years,” he writes, “my life and work, interconnected, have moved out from a single X on the map. The attempt, I suppose, has always been to develop a mythology of place, by celebrating certain locations, buildings, parks, back rivers, and certain people too, reforgotten authors and artists, ordinary and extraordinary traders and survivors. Since Lights Out for the Territory in 1997, I have been associated with London walks and the practice of psychogeography. The most extreme example of this tendency was a hike around the M25 motorway, published in 2001, as London Orbital.” With his book of “documentary fiction”, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, published earlier this year, he says he has “come full circle: gathering, recording and curating rumours and legends of so many years spent in one place. A place that now finds itself threatened by monolithic development packages and computer-generated fantasies.”