Jay Griffiths

Jay Griffiths (born 1965 in Manchester) is an award-winning British writer and author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Anarchipelago and A Love Letter from a Stray Moon.^[1]

Biography

Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester, England, and grew up near Hampton Court on the outskirts of London.^[2] She once lived in a shed in Dial House, on the outskirts of Epping Forest, and now lives in Mid Wales.^[3] After studies in English Literature at Oxford University, she traveled around the world visiting indigenous communities and learning from them. Her books are based on her learning and her travels.^[4] Griffiths has appeared in the London Review of Books and has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. Her columns have appeared in The Guardian and The Ecologist, and since 2009 she has been a columnist for Orion magazine.^[5]

Jay Griffiths has also been a contributor at many cultural events including the Adelaide Festival of Ideas,^[6] the More Than Us conference with David Abram and Scottish artists Dalziel + Scullion;^[7] the Royal Academy with artists Ackroyd & Harvey;^[8] the International Sacred Arts Festival in Delhi^[9] and has been a part of the popular Radiolab podcasts. She has also been a supporter of the Aluna project, for which she gave a talk in the Hayward Gallery in March 2007.^[10]

Works

Wild: An Elemental Journey

Wild is Jay Griffiths' second book. It describes an odyssey to wildernesses of earth, ice, water, air and fire, exploring the connection between human society and wild lands. It is also a journey into wild mind, as Griffiths explores the words and meanings which shape our ideas and experience of our own wildness, the wildness of the human spirit.^[11] The book includes the description of drinking ayahuasca with shamans in the Amazon, as a treatment for depression, and discusses shamanism, nomadism and freedom. Various chapters describe journeys to the Arctic, to Australia and to the freedom fighters of West Papua.^[4]

Wild is quoted on KT Tunstall's album Tiger Suit and has been nominated by Tunstall as her favourite book.^[12] The Strokes bassist Nikolai Fraiture reads from Wild during their documentary for their album Angles.^[13]

In April 2011, Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien posted a recommendation of Wild on the band's blog, stating that it is "an astonishing piece of writing " and that "it was exactly what I needed to read".^[14]

Reviews

On publication in the UK, Wild was praised widely in major newspapers and described as ‘part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original... A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life’.^[15] The Independent referred to it as ‘remarkable’ and ‘stupendous’^[16] while The Guardian wrote: “Jay Griffiths is a five-star, card-carrying member of the hellfire club... a strange, utterly compelling book, Wild is easily the best, most rewarding travel book that I have read in the last decade.”^[17] For The Sunday Times Anthony Sattin wrote “There is no getting away from the book's brilliance”^[18] and The Independent on Sunday referred to Wild "as a song of delight, and a cry of warning, poetic, erudite and insistent… a restless, unstintingly generous performance..."^[19] and The Times referred to "kaleidoscopic narrative", "exhilarating prose".^[20] Wild was successful in Australia where it received positive reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald, described by Bruce Elder as "The best book I read all year".^[21] During an interview about the experiences discussed in Wild, Griffiths said, "To my mind, at worst, the West operates a kind of ‘intellectual apartheid’ – the idea that our way of thinking is the only one. Really, there are more ways of living and thinking than we could ever imagine."^[22]

Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time

Jay Griffiths' first book, it explores time as a political subject, showing how indigenous cultures have diverse ways of considering time (past, present and future) but illustrating how one, single, European time is colonizing all these varieties of time. It is a manifesto for cyclical time and for the times of nature, of carnival, of play: and argues that women’s time is different from men’s.^[23]

Reviews

The book was described by The Independent as “A wonderful, delightfully humorous polemic against everything that’s wrong with the way we deal with time today”.^[24] The New Scientist described it as “A whirl of a book. Any page will get you hooked”^[25] and The New Internationalist called it: “Splendid, extraordinarily wide-ranging, emphasizing the political import of the subject. Impressive, absorbing and radical, provocative, impassioned, often outrageously witty.”^[26]

A Love Letter from a Stray Moon

This short novel is published by Text Publishing. It is a novel partly based on the life of Frida Kahlo.

Awards

Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, 2003^[27]. “Jay Griffiths has produced nothing short of an original opening of the human mind… Her book is cleverness in the service of genius.” (Citation on winning the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award).^[28]

Wild won the inaugural Orion Book Award for 2007,^[29] was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2008 and the Spread The Word World Book Day Award 2009.

Notes