Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2022 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 Plutarch Award
A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of 2022
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Times Literary
Supplement, and Literary Hub
From the standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents
a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love,
sex, and death.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity
preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being
just one thing.
He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of
Parliament--and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the
English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was
imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year-old girl without her father's
consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill
and in pain. He was a man who suffered from surges of misery, yet
expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and
love.
In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed act of
evangelism, showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his
obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan
times--unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in
living.
