The acclaimed biographer and obituarist for The Economist reflects on a career spent pursuing life and capturing it on the page. It is soul that I go looking for. Or, to put it another way, real life. 'She's a genius, I believe' HILARY MANTEL 'A masterful celebration' JOHN BANVILLE 'A rare and beautiful book' KAPKA KASSABOVA 'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In this dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, Ann Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after. Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.

The foil to Jesus, the defiant antihero of the Easter story, mocking, skeptical Pilate is a historical figure who haunts our imagination. For some he is a saint, for others the embodiment of human weakness, an archetypal politician willing to sacrifice one man for the sake of stability. In this dazzlingly conceived biography, a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Ann Wroe brings man and myth to life. Working from classical sources, she plunges us into the world of biblical Judaea under the reign of the erratic and licentious emperor Tiberius and lets us see the trial of Jesus, in all its confusion, from the point of view of his executioner.

For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. In this extraordinary work Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, from the forests where he walked and the mountains where he worshipped to the artefacts, texts and philosophies built up round him. She traces the man, and the power he represents, through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and journey to Hades, and his terrible death. We see him tantalising Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalising the Fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death.

The facts about Pontius Pilate are very few. We don't know when he was born or when he died. We know nothing of his career before he became Governor of Judea, and nothing of what happened to him after he was recalled by Tiberius. Some say he came from Rome, others from Spain or Germany. Everyone - from the evangelists to the writers of the medieval mystery plays - has his own Pilate, each symbolic of something, each a projection of his own ideas and anxieties. This extraordinary book is about all our Pilates, real, half-real and invented. Some are familiar, some surprising. They have depths and contrasts that are unexpected. They do remarkable things. Among these surprises, perhaps, are the glimpses we get of a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea, feeling his shoes pinch, clicking his fingers for a slave, while the clouds of lasting infamy gather over his head.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE CATHOLIC HERALD BOOK AWARDS 2019** A life of St Francis in verse Throughout her career Ann Wroe has constantly confounded expectations, following her own unique path. Now, in Francis, she turns to verse to tell the life of St Francis of Assisi. This is a sequence only Ann Wroe could write, combining a troubadour's musicality with full grasp of the moment, and a luminous sense of Francis as both myth and man, across history and culture, in nature and community. It is a remarkable and immensely beautiful book. St Francis was one of the most compelling spirits the world has seen. He was also a poet, a musician and a dancer. His world was coloured by troubadour lays, brightened by birdsong, ordered by the bells and chants of the Church and transfigured by the angel-lyres he heard about him. For Ann Wroe, this seems a good reason to write his life in songs. It is also an excuse to record, in songs, the many ways his presence and his music still linger round us. They surprise us in chance encounters in city streets; they waylay us amid the humdrum banalities of working life; they persist in the beauties of nature. Great spirits never leave us. They echo on and on.

Four questions consumed Shelley and coloured everything he wrote. Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? He sought the answers in order to free and empower not only himself, but the whole human race. His revolution would shatter the earth's illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true Love and Liberty - and take everyone with him. Ann Wroe's book takes the life of one of England's greatest poets and turns it inside out, bringing us the life of the poet rather than the man. The result is a journey that is as passionate and exhilarating as it is astonishing. This is Shelley as he has never been seen before.

The story of Perkin Warbeck is one of the most compelling mysteries of English history. A young man suddenly emerged claiming to be Richard of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower. As such, he tormented Henry VII for eight years. He tried three times to invade England and behaved like a prince. Officially, however, he was proclaimed to be Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish boatman. A diplomatic pawn, he was used by the greatest European rulers of the age for their own purposes. All who dealt with him gave him the identity they wished him to have: either the Duke of York or a jumped-up lad from Flanders. It is possible that he was neither. It is also possible that, by the end, even he did not really know who he was. In Perkin Ann Wroe tells again a marvellous tale that is on the brink of being forgotten. She also dissects the official cover story. In doing so she delves into the secret corners of European history and produces a portrait of the late fifteenth century that is breathtaking in its detail.--'Extraordinary-Perkin is a masterclass in how biography can breathe life into the darkest and most inert pockets of the past' Guardian --'An unforgettable book-. The best b

Ann Wroe brings to life a rich and perplexing culture of a city physically divided-as so many communities are today-by political factions in this skillful re-creation of fourteenth-century Rodez. Notes, bibliography.