Iain Sinclair

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For the Australian politician, see Ian Sinclair.

Iain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker.

Sinclair was born on June 11, 1943. His education includes studies at Trinity College (Dublin), Courtauld Institute of Art, and London School of Film Technique (now London Film School).

Much of his early work was poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and is) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s -- authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, Sinclair edited the important Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the anthology Conductors of Chaos.

His books have worked out an occultist psychogeography of London in increasingly ambitious, elaborate detail, creating a mythos in which Nicholas Hawksmoor, Jack the Ripper, John Dee, Arthur Conan Doyle and countless other historical figures are all part of a larger pattern. Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987, originally a limited edition from Goldmark but reprinted by Paladin), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a scuzzy band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).

Sinclair is best known for the novel Downriver published in 1991, which won the James Tait Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Prize. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) effectively trashes the London Millennium Dome. One of his most recent works of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject (the paperback version came out in 2003). It describes the series of trips he took, on foot, following the M25, London's outer-ring motorway.