Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian ‘He has a burning originality’ … Rundell, who once wrote a book in a month. People came to experience the sheer stage presence; but they also relished the physical energy of the words, the music of rhythms and cadences constructed by an expert rhetorician. Perhaps inevitably, he even preached his own funeral sermon, Death’s Duel, dragging his ailing body into the pulpit at St Paul’s in February 1631 one final time to settle accounts with his deity and himself.

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There is the meat and madness of sex in his work – but, more: Donne’s poetry believed in finding eternity through the human body of one other person. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Katherine Rundell makes Donne come alive as a remarkable and extraordinary and almost boundless human being. She observes that “the body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show; a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes, over the sensations of which we have very little control”.A few years before his own death, Donne preached a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert, mother of the poet George Herbert, a woman who had been his patron and friend. Donne is more daring than he sounds: the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas’s ideal was the ‘Mixed Life’, one of contemplation and action. From his earlier days, when excited by the nakedness of his body, till later in life, when he feared the nakedness of his soul, Donne’s life was as inspirited by love, language, sex, and God as much as it was complicated by ambition, illness, money problems, and the death of six of his children. Rundell’s childhood in Zimbabwe – running barefoot in the wilds and avoiding imaginary crocodiles in rivers – makes her sound like a plucky children’s book heroine. It refuses to be pretty, because sex is not and because Donne does not, in his love poetry, insist on sweetness: he does not play the ‘my lady is a perfect dove’ game beloved by those who came before him.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

Before the invention of the pax the congregation used to kiss each other, until it was felt this was unreasonably intimate – and plaguey – for church. Mortality was not a quiet cessation but an entry into an unimaginably enhanced and concentrated sensuality, the “one equal music” he evokes in a much-quoted sermon. Donne seems to deserve the questionable recognition of being the first to so use ‘purse’ for female genitalia. But I do think the kind of iron-willed effort it takes to remain astonished by astonishment has a kind of politics to it. Published after Super-Infinity, this collection of short essays celebrates endangered creatures from crows to pangolins.

The winner was announced by Chair of Judges, Caroline Sanderson, at a ceremony hosted at the Science Museum and generously supported by The Blavatnik Family Foundation.

Review: ‘Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

If caught, Elizabeth would not have been safe from punishment by virtue of her sex: in 1592 a Mrs Ward was hanged, drawn and quartered for helping a Catholic priest to escape his pursuers in a box; a Mrs Lynne was put to death for harbouring a priest in her home. In response the English government’s attitudes to the Catholic population became more anxious, more repressive, more bloody. He should, really, have been a scholar with a quiet, paper-bound life, chewing on swan-feather quills (Elizabeth’s preferred writing pen: popular at court) and disputing the finer points of religious heresy. Donne’s family history was one of blood and fire; a great-uncle was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed: another was locked inside the Tower of London, where as a small schoolboy Donne visited him, venturing fearfully in among the men convicted to death.Super-Infinite revitalizes what a literary biography can be: an urgent, visionary approach but also endlessly intellectually generous, open-hearted, and bold. Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud. Not ‘strange’ as in ‘unfamiliar’, for being killed for your religion was hardly new; strange as in unmoored from all sense, reason, sanity.

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Because amid all Donne’s reinventions, there was a constant running through his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle. Oxford fellow Katherine Rundell does all of this with an engaging spirit not often seen in academic books . And it is this Donnish incitement to wonderment that infuses Rundell’s most recent book, The Golden Mole. More’s wit was inexhaustible, uncompromising, and with him to the very last breath: ‘I pray you,’ he was supposed to have said to the executioner as he mounted the scaffold, ‘master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.He was racked, over and over again, by life-threatening illnesses, with dozens of bouts of fever, aching throat, vomiting; at least three times it was believed he was dying. And then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. What a delightful book Super-Infinite is: companionable, astute, intimate in tone and clear-eyed in judgment, it brings Donne and his milieu to glorious life. Her sizzling prose blows away the cobwebs of academia and makes this a deeply satisfying, joyful read.