Victoria MacKenzie on Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem

Victoria MacKenzie on Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem

We welcome back to St Andrews award-winning writer Victoria MacKenzie for her new novel about grief, trauma, revelation and art.

"MacKenzie has an almost painterly approach to storytelling. Each character is carefully and vividly rendered." - Jan Carson

"MacKenzie's account of Ruskin's life cuts through the prurient myth to give us the man as he likely was." - Annie Garthwaite

The celebrated art critic, the revered Professor of Art John Ruskin, the author of countless books, the campaigner for social reform, the man who taught a generation to see, finds himself stumbling blindly in the wake of a terrible grief: the madness and death of a young woman he once loved.

Following Ruskin from candlelit seances in country houses to the dazzling palazzos of Venice to the rainswept hills of the Lake District, Victoria MacKenzie captures the exquisite anguish of a man who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his work, and yet whose attempts at intimacy were hopelessly thwarted.

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer and poet based in Scotland. Her debut novel For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain was awarded Best First Book in Scotland's National Book Awards and selected as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Guardian, Scotsman and Irish Times. MacKenzie is the winner of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award and the inaugural Emerging Writer Award from Moniack Mhor. She works as a freelance creative writing tutor and mentor.