Michael Hurley

Professor of Literature and Theology, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michael Hurley is Britain’s presiding expert on the life and work of the inimitable poet-priest Gerald Manley Hopkins. Hurley has written, taught and published extensively about Victorian and modernist literature in academe, but will now turn to face the general reader for the first time with a book that aims to do for Hopkins what Katherine Rundell did for Donne. Hurley is determined to give back to Hopkins his sense of play and to strip him of lingering misapprehensions. His book, GOLD-VERMILLION, will, he says, “introduce the reader to the breathtaking originality of his poems – compacted but precise, profound but playful – in a way that brings them alive, by matching them to the events in his life from which they sprang. Academic studies of Hopkins typically present the poet in sepia-tones, as a severe, even sepulchral cleric, when he was in fact childishly fond of practical jokes, with an ardent religious faith, full of desire, and exceptionally sensitive to the beauty of the natural world.”