Author(s): SHAPCOTT, THOMAS

Biography & Memoir

In A Circle Around My Grandmother, Thomas Shapcott charts life via the geography of the body, its delicacy and disintegration. An unexpected initiation into the world of tubes and needles is the point of origin of Shapcott's travail, the work of negotiating the detritus of memory, confronting the mystery of the body, and accepting the happenstance of ancestry. The possibilities of revelation and renewal impel a circuitous drift towards the ancestral, from Ipswich to Ireland, mapping the external manifestation of the inner, familial inheritance. Characteristically steady and supple, A Circle Around My Grandmother is Shapcott's evocative testament to the universality of family, the idea of home and the nature of time and mortality. The rich and intensely personal life material of one of Australia's most significant and prolific writers, this is Shapcott at his most complex and complete.