Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet - Hardcover

Williams, Hugo

4.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780571175758: Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571175759 ISBN 13: 9780571175758

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1995

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Since beginning his 'Freelance' column in the Times Literary Supplement in 1988, poet and travel-writer Hugo Williams has visited Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. Part-time teaching jobs, literary festivals and writing courses have kept him both busy and bemused, but he has also found time to get a taste of roistering, cross-dressing, tight-rope walking, drug-scoring, fashion modelling and archaeology. Memories of his apprenticeship at the London Magazine and of Soho in the '70s, encounters with the likes of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Gioconda Belli and the station master at Gospel Oak, news of a bogus 'Ted Hughes', evocations of the theatrical world of his parents and of his wife's French childhood - these are among the things that have occupied his constantly questing mind.
The despatches collected in Freelancing amount to a piecemeal autobiography, in the course of which the author's Selected Poems are published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. Always elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, at times surprisingly poignant, Hugo Williams's column has earned him a devoted following among readers of the TLS - one due to be enlarged by the publication of this book.

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Review:

In this collection of essays from his column for the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, self-proclaimed freelance poet Hugo Williams is by turns wry and self-effacing, witty and tender. Accustomed to "being entertained for a living" as a television, theater, and film critic, Williams finds writing a regular column to be "like having a small excitable dog to look after. At first it is sweet. Gradually it develops a life of its own. It gets hungry. It gets sick. It gets bored. Sometimes it's all too much." Williams's accounts of the freelance life, combined with that of the itinerant academic (he teaches a writing workshop in the Dordogne one week, reads at the Jerusalem Poetry Festival another, makes a pilgrimage to Rupert Brooke's grave on the island of Skyros yet another), are highly amusing. "Coffee," writes Williams, "is the drug of the chronic freelance. It reproduces, for money, the state of anxious chaos that exists in his room, his brain, his work schedule, his bank account, and his love-life." On deadlines: "You have a little affair with them," says Williams, "fraught with betrayals, recriminations and brinkmanship."

When he's not pondering freelancing, creative writing, or book signings ("you sign everything in sight," his brother recommends, "that way they can't remainder them"), Williams tries his hand at cross-dressing, modeling, archaeology, and retrieving his love letters from his first girlfriend. After all, "everyone knows poets will go anywhere and do anything to get out of the house."

About the Author:

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.

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