Martin Booth

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Martin Booth (September 7, 1944, Lancashire - February 12, 2004, Devon) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher, scriptwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Martin Booth was born in Lancashire, and was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, which he left in 1964. He made his name as a poet and poetry publisher, producing elegant volumes of poetry by some of the best British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. One of his most interesting book of poems was The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth lived at the time. The book includes a series of powerful short lyrics in which the poet seeks links with the present in the Saxon past and with the Knot who gave his name to the village.

Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary poetry, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures. In the late 1970s, Booth turned mainly to fiction, and his first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe was published in 1985. The book is based on a man Booth met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains vivid passages about that city during the Second World War.

Booth was a veteran traveller who always retained a boy's enthusiasm about flying (which appears in poems like 'Kent Says', in Killing the Moscs, which was a huge success in readings). He enjoyed watching wildlife, a double passion which resulted in a book on the big-game hunter and man-eating tiger expert Jim Corbett.

As a son of Empire, many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of America, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy - which featured in many of his later poems and in the novel A Very private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies. His 1998 novel Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

Booth died in 2004 shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children. It was a poignant way to end his life and career; as a child, a fortune-teller in Hong Kong had predicted Booth would die in his fifty-ninth-year. As a believer in the occult, a passion which led to his biography of Aleister Crowley (2000), Booth was sadly convinced of the truth of this prediction.

[edit] Works

Paper Pennies and Other Poems (1967)
Supplication to the Himalayas. A Poem and Sketch (1968)
In the Yenan Caves (1969)
A Winnowing of Silence (1971) (poems)
Pilgrims and Petitions (1971)
The Crying Embers (1971) (poems)
On the Death of Archdeacon Broix (1971)
James Elroy Flecker, Unpublished Poems and Drafts (1971) (editor)
White (1971)
In Her Hands (1973) (poem)
Teller: Four Poems (1973)
Brevities (1974) (poems)
Hands Twining Grasses (1974) (poems)
Spawning The Os (1974)
Yogh (1974) (poems)
Snath (1975)
Two Boys and a Girl, Playing in a Churchyard (1975) (poem)
Stalks of Jade: Renderings of early Chinese erotic verse (1976)
Horse and Rider, a poem (1976)
The Book of Cats (1977) (editor with George MacBeth)
Extending Upon the Kingdom (1977)
Folio/Work in Progress. Poems (1977) (broadside anthology, editor with John Stathatos)
The Knotting Sequence (1977)
The Dying (1978)
The Earth Man Dreams of a Turned Sod (1978)
Winter's Night: Knotting (1979)
Decadal: Ten Years of Sceptre Press (1979)
Calling with Owls (1979) (poems)
The Bad Track (1980) (novel)
Devil's Wine (1980) (poems)
Bismarck (1980)
British Writing Today (1981) (editor)
The Cnot Dialogues (1981)
Meeting the Snowy North Again (1982) (poems)
Looking for the Rainbow Sign: Poems of America (1983)
Tenfold: Poems for Frances Horovitz (1983) (editor)
Travelling Through the Senses: A Study of the Poetry of George MacBeth (1983)
Contemporary British And North American Verse (1984) (editor)
British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving through the barricades (1985)
Hiroshima Joe (1985) (novel)
Killing the Moscs (1985)
Under the Sea (Impressions) (1985)
Aleister Crowley: Selected Poems (1986)
Carpet Sahib, A Life of Jim Corbett (1986) (biography of a shikari)
The Jade Pavilion (1987) (novel)
Black Chameleon (1988) (novel)
Dreaming of Samrkand (1989) (novel)
A Very Private Gentleman (1990) (novel)
American Dreams. A Poem (1992) (broadside)
Rhino Road: The Black and White Rhinos of Africa (1992)
The Humble Disciple (1992) (novel)
The Iron Tree (1993) (novel)
Toys of Glass (1995) (novel)
Adrift In The Oceans Of Mercy (1996)
War Dog (1996) (novel)
Opium: A History (1996)
Doctor and the Detective - a Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1997)
Music on the Bamboo Radio (1997) (novel)
The Industry of Souls (1998) (novel)
Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley (2000)
The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads (2000)
PoW (2000)
Panther (2001)
Islands Of Silence (2002) (novel)
The Alchemist's Son: Doctor Illuminatus (2003) (fantasy fiction)
Cannabis: A History (2003)
Gweilo : memories of a Hong Kong childhood (2004) [US ed., 2005, pub'd as "Golden Boy"]
Midnight Saboteur (2004)
The Alchemist's Son: Soul Stealer (2004)