From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.
In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
Katherine Rundell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of acclaimed books for children, including the multiaward-winning Impossible Creatures. Her books for adult readers include Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures and Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. She was the 2024 recipient of the British Book Award for Author of the Year. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London and is currently a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.
Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.