Book description
In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the
Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the
full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist,
working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the
contemporary writer. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns
that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem,
Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his
Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau
and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do,
but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters
some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His
account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly
turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.
Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on
the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his
living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy's Rain won the T. S.
Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002
and his last collection, Dear Room, was published in 2006. He writes a
freelance column for the TLS and lives in London.
