SHEFFIELD AUTHORS
- Stories "Made in Sheffield"
Matt Carr
Matt Carr is a writer and journalist. His nonfiction books include the widely acclaimed memoir of his Caribbean childhood, My Father’s House (Hamish Hamilton 1997); The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (New Press 2007); Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain 1492–1614 (Hurst/New Press 2009); Fortress Europe: Inside the War Against Immigration (Hurst/New Press 2012), and Savage Frontier: The Pyrenees in History (Hurst/New Press 2018).
His first novel The Devils of Cardona (Penguin Random House 2017) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His journalism has been published in The Guardian, the New Statesman, The Observer, the London Review of Books, the New York Times International and Literary Hub.
He has spoken at numerous literary festivals, and taught creative writing to adults and teenagers. Until recently he was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Sheffield University.
A lifelong Hispanophile, Matt writes fiction and nonfiction often focused on themes from Spanish and Latin American culture, history, and politics. He is the founder of the 1 Day Without Us campaign in solidarity with migrants, and a co-host of the podcast Grim Up North: A Podcast About the North, from the North.
In December 1832, Charles Darwin sailed into Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, where he first encountered ‘Indians’. ‘I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage and civilised man is,’ he wrote. ‘It is greater than between a wild and [a] domesticated animal.’ But he was shocked by the ‘war of extermination’ he witnessed in northern Patagonia, waged by the colonising army of Buenos Aires.
Matthew Carr explores how these experiences influenced Darwin’s writings, and the theories of scientific racism that others drew from his work. In a sweeping account of soldiers, missionaries, anthropologists and skull-collecting scientists, he traces the connections between colonial expansionism and the tragic ‘extinction’ of South America’s conquered peoples.
From Indigenous graveyards and military memorials to archaeological sites and natural history museums, this is a compelling journey through Patagonia past and present. Amid global battles for historical memory, culture wars over race and empire, and ongoing struggles for Indigenous rights, Carr chronicles the subjugation of Argentina’s First Peoples—and the ideas that made it possible. Read an extract here: EXTRACT
In the summer of 1586, Genoese banker Sandro Grandoni is murdered. Magistrate Bernardo de Mendoza is put in charge of the investigation. With King Philip II preparing to invade England, it is a delicate political moment. King Philip II is preparing to invade England, and the Crown is negotiating a new loan with the House of Grandoni to help finance the invasion. While the king and his ministers await the arrival of the imperial treasure fleet in Seville, one of Grandoni’s partners is murdered on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Philip sends Mendoza to the violent, vice-ridden imperial city of Seville to see if the murders are connected. Mendoza soon finds himself entangled a bewildering web of intrigue and corruption, that extends from the Indies to the streets of Seville. Throughout the sweltering Andalusian summer, Mendoza follows the trail of deaths, as the search for justice becomes a struggle for survival, in which no one’s life is guaranteed.