It only recently occurred to me that 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of our slim volume, Outremer. Several things have transpired since 1994, not least the advent, almost immediately, of the internet, making my trips to the British Library and expenditure on microfiche copies of several works a quaint detail from the analogue era. But I want to talk about something both more recent and closer to home - something that I'm still processing, along with many others.
Marcus Sedgwick - my dear friend, collaborator and illustrator - tragically passed away in November 2022. Marcus and his elder brother Julian were schoolfriends of mine: together we endured the school's dysfunctional regime of unchecked, mildly psychotic bullying, but my frequent visits to their family home were always a mind-opening joy. This was thanks not only to them but to their father, Geoffrey, who was a force in the adult education world and a man who, despite his sometimes bluff teacherly Lancashire manner, unfailingly took interest in anyone who seemed to have something going on in their synapses - a life of the mind, as it were. He died in 1988, and would surely have been immensely proud of Marcus and Julian's subsequent careers as writers.
Marcus was mostly an illustrator back then, and produced some lino prints for Outremer that I think have an exquisite minimalism. He was a big admirer of the work of print artists like William Blake and Eric Ravilious and, perhaps above all, the writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake. Here are a couple of his Outremer illustrations, done no favours by my smartphone camera.
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| This stone angel is probably my favourite: a touch of folk horror that he went on to explore in novels like Witch Hill. |
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| The sunflower was a device sometimes used by troubadours, and is explicitly mentioned in Browning's 'Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli'. |
Marcus started his writing career in earnest around the same time that we published Outremer, which was printed by a small company in Cambridge; he collected the 500 copies himself, and we shared the duties of hand-numbering each one.
And here we are, thirty years later. Except that he's not. Marcus is hugely missed.
