IAIN SINCLAIR

Iain Sinclair is a writer and filmmaker who has been based in Hackney, East London, for fifty years. His works of fiction include White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (Goldmark, 1987) and Downriver (Paladin, 1991) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award. His many non-fiction explorations include Lights Out for the Territory (Granta, 1997), London Orbital (Granta, 2002), Edge of the Orison (Penguin, 2005), Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (Penguin, 2009), Black Apples of Gower (Little Toller, 2015), and The Last London (Penguin, 2017). He has collaborated on films with Chris Petit, Andrew Kötting, John Rogers, and Grant Gee. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Surrey. After many years of investigating notions of place in London, Iain – in his submission ‘The Silence in the Forest’ – has stepped ‘out of his knowledge’ in order to follow his great-grandfather’s 1891 expedition to the headwaters of the Amazon. He travelled in company with his daughter before the lockdown. The dialogue between the unknowable ancestor and the actively researching daughter pushed Sinclair to redefine what he understood by the ownership and colonisation of place. A book, The Gold Machine, will be published by Oneworld in 2021, which documents this journey in full but the piece here has been written for PLACE 2020.