authorDiscover the Best Books Written by Sarah Bakewell
Sarah Bakewell was born in Bournemouth on the English south coast. Still, she spent most of her childhood in Sydney, Australia, after several years traveling the hippie trail through Asia with her parents. Returning to Britain, she studied philosophy at the University of Essex. She worked as a curator of early printed books at London’s Wellcome Library for ten years before devoting herself to full-time writing in 2002. She now lives mostly in London and teaches Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.
She is a historical biographer and writer on the history of ideas. Her first book, The Smart, related the story of an infamous forgery trial in eighteenth-century London. Her second, The English Dane, was a biography of Jorgen Jorgenson, a flamboyant Danish adventurer who led a revolution in Iceland in 1809.
Her four books are all biographical, and the most recent two, 'How to Live: a life of Montaigne' and 'At the Existentialist Cafe,' also explore philosophical ideas. 'How to Live' won the Duff Cooper Prize and the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and 'At the Existentialist Cafe' was chosen in 2016 as one of the New York Times's Ten Best Books of the Year.
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer is an unorthodox biography of the sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in the U.S. and the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction in the U.K. and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Marsh Biography Award.
Her latest work, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails was published by Penguin in 2017. It was also shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. in 2018, she received the Windham-Campbell prize for her contribution to non-fiction. She now lives in London and the Marche region of Italy. When not writing, she works as a freelance rare-books cataloguer and teaches courses in creative non-fiction.
