Iain Bamforth

Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health conultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His four books of poetry were joined by a fifth, The Crossing Fee, in 2013. His prose includes The Body in the Library (Verso, 2003), an anthology of modern medicine as told through literature, The Good European (Carcanet, 2006), a collection of writings on European literary history and Scattered Limbs (Galileo, 2020), a “dreambook” about medicine and modernity. His interest in the ars vivendi continues in his latest Carcanet book Zest: Essays on the Art of Living (2022), which goes from discussing an early modern instar of Google World to his own travels in Indonesia. Other topics include “Balzac, Bowie, communication theory, Kleist, olive trees and olive oil, the blueness of the sky, Lou Andreas-Salomé, ferns, Pessoa’s Lisbon, noise and silence, Wittgenstein and photography, Leipzig, craft traditions, Tobias Smollett and the quasi-Swiftian humour of the Book of Jonah” (to quote from the TLS review). Several of his wide-ranging essays and reviews can be read on his website.

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