Robin Wilkey and
his wife Hilary | About
the author Robin
was born in the historic City of Bath in 1950.
After leaving school
Robin studied life drawing at Bath Academy of Art under John Eaves and in his
spare time often painted landscapes in oils, which occasionally he still enjoys.
A number of poetry collections mark Robin's early writings and the inspiration
of writers at this time included Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlighetti,
Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, as well as the English 'beat' poets.
As a young man Robin studied the great German philosophers and theologians
such as Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer and Barth but later turned to the existentialists,
particularly the French such as Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre and the idyllic
novels of Colette.
The writers Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka
(the three 'K's!) inspired his first two novels, however, Franz Kafka's work has
a particular impact in his second novel 'The Dark Mirror of Desire', which is
filled with anecdotes and reflections on his life and work.
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| Moving
to Swindon in 1977 with his wife Hilary and travelling extensively in Europe,
Robin spent more time reading and studying both English classical and American
modern literature and thus established a passion for both diverse and ironic styles
of diction, whilst at the same time being fascinated by what the Moravian composer
Leoš Janácek explored through music as the 'natural voice curves of
speech', i.e. the natural rhythms of the music of ordinary speech.
Thus
what brought Fyodor Dostoevsky's autobiographical novel 'From the House of the
Dead' or the 'Katá' music of Katá Kabanová from Ostrovsky's
play 'Burya' (The Storm) to life could be applied as much to the poetic reasoning
of the novel, as to any other related artistic endeavour.
To live in
the post-Janácek period is to come to terms with the same modernist view
as the so called 'new wave' literature that came out of the post-60's period in
Central Europe, which effectively transformed the art of writing and its conventions.
Robin has endeavoured
to explore some of these issues, more particularly in his second novel, which
deals with a group of young people standing at the crossroads of political change
in Central Europe.
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