In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Anna Thomasson chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about *A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War.*
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
- Why Anna Thomasson chose a collective biography to reveal the chemistry and interconnected lives of nine surrealists.
- How a 1937 summer at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon became the book’s narrative and symbolic starting point.
- What photographs reveal about historical lives and why their apparent intimacy can never yield the whole truth.
- How letters, diaries, poems and artworks became ‘wormholes’ into her subjects’ experiences.
- Why Anna Thomasson preserves archival silences and honours Ady Fidelin’s right to opacity rather than speculating.
- How short chapters, juxtaposition and a collage of fragments sustain momentum across nine intersecting lives.
- Why contradictions, omissions and self-mythologising belong inside biography instead of being smoothed into certainty.
- Thomasson’s advice to biographers: set research boundaries, trust your instincts and accept that every life remains provisional.
Gabriella Kelly-DaviesHost
