About 1 — Mark Hudson

His first book, Our Grandmothers’ Drums, about a stay in a remote village in the Gambia, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of the year. Coming Back Brockens, inspired by a year living in a former mining village in County Durham, won the NCR Award, precursor of the Baillie Gifford Prize, for the best non-fiction book of the year. His novel The Music in my Head was published to critical acclaim in 1998, while his most recent book Titian, the Last Days, is a personal study of the great Venetian painter, focusing on his mysterious final paintings

Hudson’s writing methods are as diverse as his subjects, including elements of personal participation, history, cultural criticism and autobiography, an approach described by Roger Clarke in the Sunday Times as “exploring the boundaries of fiction and travel writing.”

Mark Hudson was born in Yorkshire. He studied fine-art at Chelsea School of Art and Winchester School of Art, and co-founded the London Screenwriters’ Workshop with a group of other emergent writers in 1983. He wrote Episode 28 of the BBC soap opera Eastenders, an experience he has described as “a complete fuck up.”

A stay with a friend carrying out scientific research in the Gambia led to Our Grandmothers’ Drums. Wanting to focus on his “own” culture, Hudson then spent a year in Horden, the Durham village where his father was born and where several generations of his family worked as coal miners, an experience described in Coming Back Brockens.

Hudson’s novel The Music in my Head was ahead of its time in addressing themes of cultural appropriation, identity and migration through the predicament of a white British music entrepreneur stranded in a fictional African city. Titian, the Last Days, interweaves the present and the past in an investigation into the circumstances and meanings surrounding the Venetian master’s enigmatic
last paintings.

Mark Hudson is the art critic of the Independent, and was for five years chief art critic of the Daily Telegraph. His writings on art and music have appeared in the Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer, Financial Times, Mail on Sunday, Elle, Gagosian Quarterly, R.A. magazine and many other publications.

He lives in London, and is currently completing a sprawling collaged memoir of life in the British capital.