Richard Skinner

Set against the dramatically imagined backdrop of Europe on the brink of the Great War, The Red Dancer re-creates the life of Mata Hari, last century's most romantic, enigmatic, tragic spy. In 1895, Margaretha Zelle, a destitute young woman from The Hague, answers a personal ad placed by a Dutch army captain twice her age seeking a wife. After a speedy marriage, she departs with him for a posting in Indonesia. Marred by violence, infidelity, bitter feuding, and their son's disturbing death, the marriage collapses. Returning to Europe, Margaretha travels to Paris, where, inspired by the exotic enchantment of Eastern dance, she reinvents herself as the erotic dancer Mata Hari ("Eye of the Dawn"), the likes of which the Continent has never seen. Just as the major European powers lurch toward explosive conflict, Mata Hari's reputation as a dancer and courtesan starts to attract the attention of powerful admirers from Madrid to Vienna, from Berlin to St. Petersburg. Entrapped, Mata Hari is drawn into a military intrigue that will affect the course of World War I. Narrated by historical figures whose lives intersected with Mata Hari's -- from her husband to her executioner -- The Red Dancer explores the mystery and downfall of a woman at the center of a notorious espionage scandal that has inspired historians and artists for generations. Ranging from exotic Indonesia to the seedy dance halls of Paris, it brilliantly depicts the delicious and eerie decadence of fin de sicle Europe and the onset of a global conflict that ended an era.

The Life and Times of Mata Hari

The Red Dancer

A novel is a relationship, a place outside of time where both reader and writer are challenged and validated, stretched and rewarded. Richard Skinner believes it is your duty as a novelist to bring your whole self to the page; to find your story, not force it; to meet your reader in a spirit of openness. In Writing a Novel he offers up frameworks, strategies and stimuli to help you meet that duty, drawingon his deep experience as one of the UK's leading creative writing teachers. He covers the essentials - narrators, character, setting - with charm and rigour. But Writing a Novel is not a set of instructions: it is a way of thinking, a conversation, a relationship in itself.

Bring Your Ideas to Life the Faber Academy Way

Writing a Novel

Vade Mecum brings together Richard Skinner’s best essays, reviews and interviews from 1992-2014. There are close critical engagements with writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and composers (Erik Satie, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), meditations on films and filmmakers (Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chinatown) and idiosyncratic reflections on Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steely Dan.

Essays, Reviews & Interviews

Vade Mecum

From earthworms to CD-ROMs, from starfish to blizzards, from electrons to garden forks, from doubt to a shout of laughter ... This beautiful little book of invocations inspired by creatures, conditions and objects in the world around us which reflect and a

Calling on the God in All

Invocations

A new edition of Richard Skinner's classic novel about the life of Mati Hari, released to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of her death, October 2017. When Margaretha Zelle, a young woman living in The Hague, answers a lonely hearts advertisement she becomes drawn into a relationship with an army captain twice her age. After a hasty wedding, they depart for Indonesia, where the marriage collapses amid infidelity and violence. Seeking a new life, Margaretha returns to Europe and travels to Paris, where she adopts the stage name Mata Hari, reinventing herself as an exotic dancer. In her new role she attracts the attention of numerous admirers, many of whom are officers, ready to share their secrets with a woman of notorious allure and intrigue, as Europe lurches towards explosive conflict.

From growing up in Trinidad in the late 1960s, Richard Skinner recalls the first time he was infected by those languid rhythms we call Dub. From there, he charts a compelling history of the genre; from Kingston and the rise of King Tubby, to the Dub music that reshaped black communities across Britain in the 1990s.www.nochpublishing.com

Red Hot vs Ice Cold

Erik Satie - composer, dandy, eccentric - is dead. Told to select one memory to take with him into the afterlife, he finds himself in limbo with a community of the deceased, looking back at his fifty-nine years for their most precious moments. Evenings of absinthe at the Chat Noir? Friendships with Debussy, Duchamp and Man Ray? What of his great musical triumphs and disasters? How will he choose his own legacy before silent whiteness descends? Venice, 1511. In the convent of Sant' Alvise, Oliva is about to take the veil and become a bride of Christ. When her world is shaken - first, literally, by an earthquake, and then, spiritually, by forces that threaten to change the convent for ever - she begins to ask questions about her faith and her future. When she agrees to sit for Signor Avílo, the renowned portrait painter, he brings with him a diabolical object: a mirror. And reflections can be dangerous. Told with playful elegance, these are two utterly original tales of art and devotion, of religious and creative fervour. They contemplate the eternal in different ways - one examining a life only just beginning, tentatively; the other a life lived without compromise as it reaches its close.

Richard Skinner

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