Jim Knowlson
James Knowlson Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Reading.. A friend of Samuel Beckett for twenty years, he wrote his authorized biography, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett (Bloomsbury, London, 1996). This was short-listed for the Whitbread Biography Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Britain in 1996 and won the Southern Arts Association’s prize for the best non-fiction work over a three year period. In the USA, it won the George Freedley Memorial Award for the outstanding book on theatre of 1996. It was translated into seven languages. Earlier, he had written or edited ten other books on Beckett, including Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition (1971), Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (1972), Frescoes of the Skull; the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (with John Pilling) (1979), and Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook (1985). He has written other essays on modern drama published in Beckett in Dublin, Modern French Drama, Around the Absurd, etc. He founded the Journal of Beckett Studies in 1976 and, back in 1971, established the Beckett Archive, now a charitable trust, The Beckett International Foundation, in the University of Reading and remains an adviser.
In 2004, he published Images of Beckett (Cambridge University Press) with the British theatre photographer, John Haynes. He general edited for Faber and Faber the four-volumed series of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett; he also edited the Krapp’s Last Tape volume and co-edited Waiting for Godot for that series. His latest book for the Beckett centenary in 2006 is Beckett Remembering – Remembering Beckett (with Elizabeth Knowlson). It will be published in March 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK, by Arcade Publications in the USA and by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany.
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