In Tasmania - Nicholas Shakespeare

The settlement of Tasmania by Europeans began 200 years ago. Nicholas Shakespeare first went there, having heard of the island's exceptional beauty, and because it was famously remote. He soon decided that this was where he wanted to live. Only later did he discover a cache of letters written by an ancestor as corrupt as he was colourful: Anthony Fenn Kemp, the so-called "Father of Tasmania". On his mother's side, too, Shakespeare found he had unknown Tasmanian relations: a pair of spinsters who had never left their farm except once, in 1947, to buy shoes. Their journal recounted a saga beginning in North Devon in the 1890s with a dashing but profligate ancestor who, having played tennis with the Kaiser, ended his life in disgrace in the Tasmanian bush-

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves (1989), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; The High Flyer, for which he was chosen for the Granta list in 1993 and The Dancer Upstairs which was the American Libraries Association's Best Novel of 1997. His biography, Bruce Chatwin (1999), was published to unstinting critical acclaim and sold 26,000 copies in hardback.