Bakewell was born in the seaside town of Bournemouth, England, where her parents ran a small hotel. When she was five, the family began travelling through India in a camper and continued to do so for two years before settling in Sydney, Australia. There, her father worked as a bookseller and her mother worked as a librarian. As a child, she often wrote, and spent some of her young adulthood working in bookstores. Bakewell studied philosophy at the University of Essex in England. She embarked on a PhD on philosopher Martin Heidegger, but gave it up to move to London, where she initially found work at a tea-bag factory. Bakewell later completed a post-graduate degree on Artificial Intelligence.
Career
Bakewell began writing again during her job at the Wellcome Library in London as a curator of early printed books, which she began in the early 1990s. She spent a decade at the library, where she came across interesting historical fragments and a pamphlet that would inspire her first book. The Smart, Bakewell's first book, related the story of an 18th-century forgery trial she came across in the Wellcome collection. In 2002, she quit this job to devote more energy to writing. She published The English Dane, the biography of Danish revolutionary and explorer Jorgen Jorgenson, in 2005. From 2008 to 2010, Bakewell worked as a part-time cataloger of rare books for the National Trust, cataloging historical book collections around England. In 2010 she published How to Live, a biography of 16th century essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. The book received rave reviews, with The Guardian calling it a "superb, spirited introduction to the master." Bakewell published At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails in 2016, a biography of the existentialist movement and its leaders Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. Bakewell was drawn to the existentialist movement at a young age; at age 16, she used some of her birthday money to buy a copy of Sartre's Nausea. Bakewell inserted this personal angle into the work; The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote, "As someone who came back to this material by rereading it later in life, she has made her responses part of the story." At the Existentialist Café was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by The New York Times. Bakewell teaches Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford University.
Awards and honors
2018 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction
Works
is about the existentialist movement and its leaders: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016,
The English Dane is about 19th-century Danish adventurer Jorgen Jorgenson, a key player in stirring a revolution in Iceland to break from Denmark's control.
The Smart is about an 18th-century forgery trial she came across while working at the Wellcome Library.
