Simon Mundy Knihy

As featured on CNN's Amanpour & Company and BBC Radio 4's Start the Week with Andrew Marr One of the Financial Times' best books of 2021

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War's conclusion in 1980, the narrative follows a Soviet violinist who seeks to escape his oppressive environment. A young British cellist plays a pivotal role in aiding his defection, intertwining themes of friendship, courage, and the transformative power of music. Simon Mundy draws on his political and music industry experience to craft a compelling tale of hope and resilience amidst geopolitical tension.

Waiting for Music is the fifth collection of poetry from the acclaimed writer Simon Mundy. A great champion of the arts, his relationships with musicians, visual artists and dancers are the main driving force behind his poetry, and this book sets out a playlist that stems from music, visual art and dance – from Brahms’ late piano works to a scene for soprano and dancers, written to be set by Roxanna Panufnik, that was inspired by a 16th century picture in the National Gallery. Published after a year spent waiting for music to appear on our landscape once more, Waiting for Music collects the voices of an array of composers, cultures and forms, set against backdrops ranging from Valparaiso to the Veneto, and celebrates the sounds and stages that have been missing from our lives this silent year. 'Mundy can be cheeky, he can be rueful, but he is always passionate.' Daljit Nagra (on By Fax to Alice Springs) 'A book I will take with me as my companion everywhere… Beautiful.' Bettany Hughes (on More for Helen of Troy)

By Fax to Alice Springs was Simon Mundy's second book of poems, including work from 1987 to 1995. As the title implies, the poems were written all over the world - North Carolina to Italy, Moravia to Australia - as well as in Mundy's home territory on the borders of Wales.

A cafe in Brussels that puts people at their ease - artists with European politicians, their assistants and tousled intellectuals with bar staff, twenty-somethings in need of a job with thirty-somethings who have one. Flagey is a comedy of manners that smiles refreshingly at Europe's capital, relaxed and true to its context.

Stories surrounding King Arthur have been told since time immemorial, but The Fragile Land approaches the legend from a radical angle, setting it firmly in the post-Roman world of late fifth-century Europe, chronicling the crucial years of Arthur's life, from the age of fifteen into his early thirties, as he comes to the fore as elected Overlord.

Simon Mundy's Selected Poems is a monumental collection that brings together work published in five collections, across five decades, including the critically acclaimed By Fax to Alice Springs and More for Helen of Troy, as well as the more recent Waiting for Music, which included many of his collaborations with composers.

Set in 2013, Flagey in Winter is a comedy of manners that takes place in the European Parliament itself, in bars where love and politics rub shoulders, and in the Italian Dolomites.

Poetry. In these poems and sequences, Simon Mundy uses a lyrical impressionism to explore people and places that are just out of reach or left behind. There is humor in his warm observation and sometimes a poignant celebration of beauty and anger at its loss. AFTER THE GAMES is Simon Mundy's third book of poems. Simon Mundy has also written several books on musicians--among them biographies of Elgar, Purcell and Tchaikovsky.