Christopher Isherwood Inside Out: a talk by Katherine Bucknell

Katherine Bucknell talks about her illuminating new biography of Christopher Isherwood, whose writings about Berlin in the 1930s made him famous.

Born in Stockport in 1904, and best known for the Berlin novels which inspired the musical Cabaret, Isherwood was one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century.

Famous in the 1930s for his novels published by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Isherwood left England in 1939 and established himself in Hollywood as a celebrated screenwriter.

His friends included Greta Garbo, Igor Stravinsky, E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, David Hockney, Edmund White and the poet W.H. Auden.

Among his books are A Single Man, filmed by Tom Ford with Colin Firth in the leading role, and Christopher and His Kind, adapted as a BBC drama starring Matt Smith and Toby Jones.

Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out reveals the drama and complexity of Isherwood’s interior world.

It tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit to an open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.

With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture through his literary works and the way he lived.

Bucknell’s insightful book reveals the private life behind the public man. Researched over a period of more than 30 years, this is the inside story of the man and his work.

We are delighted to be hosting the Manchester launch of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, described by David Hockney as ‘A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover.’