In an interview on Contemporary Art

You are starting your book choices with a writer of fiction – Etel Adnan and Master of the Eclipse.

Etel Adnan is in her mid 80s and she is one of my heroes. She is one of the great poets of her time and also a wonderful visual artist: so she bridges these two things. In the Serpentine poetry marathon we try to bridge literature and art. I’ve met her a couple of times and she’s a great inspiration. Her work gives one immense courage. I read her almost every day – it’s an addiction.

Her books are really about displacement. Master of the Eclipse is short stories, full of film-makers, poets, and it moves between geographies (she lives near San Francisco, but also in Paris and Beirut). It is also about war: she wrote in a letter that we are in ‘a constant fight against the apocalypse’ – meaning that this is a dark moment full of wars.

What is so key about Etel is also how many artists of the younger generation she inspires. And that’s how I found her. She is an artists’ artist. Etel Adnan is in the same tradition as many figures in the past who were painters and poets – but in both the poetry and short stories she is a unique voice. She is part of my project to map the 21st century, both in a book and an online map – I’m interested in how artists, web designers and poets, map our complex moment in  time. Etel did an amazing map for the book, which Thames and Hudson are publishing later this year.