Single Journey Only by Ursula Owen

Single Journey Only by Ursula Owen

Ursula Owens wide-ranging memoir begins with her fleeing Nazi Germany, explores her education and travels, her life in Egypt, Lebanon and the USA, explores her successful publishing career, her campaigning for freedom of expression, and ends with her still feeling an outsider while playing vital roles at the cultural heart of contemporary Britain.

Owen has for decades been a potent figure in the world of literature, yet as her sensitive, vital memoir reveals, she traversed radically different worlds to get thereBorn to German Jews in 1937, she recalls how the family only narrowly escapes to Britain, where her mother’s mental health promptly unravels. Owen comes of age with little sense of what she herself wants, but with revolution in the air, she’s soon juggling career, motherhood and men. Look out for lively cameos from the likes of Maya Angelou, who saves her from choking on a piece of steak.

-- Hephzibah Anderson * The Guardian *

Born in England in 1937 of secular bourgeois Jewish-German heritage, the “conformist child” quickly realised that she and her siblings would be her parents’ route to assimilation in their new country, and the first part of this book is a fascinating memoir of a girl with a foot in two cultures, trying to find her own path in life as her mother’s mental health deteriorated and she feared, from an early age, that she would one day develop schizophrenia herself.

-- Alastair Mabbott * The Herald *

She writes with an endearing modesty: her style is simple and direct. Imbued with the effort of achieving scrupulous accuracy, her frankness is disarming.

-- Sue Gaisford * Financial Times *

Like many German Jews her family weren't observant, but the fallout of their enforced migration to Britain in 1939 would echo down the years. Owen recounts her desperation to belong and her mother's struggles with mental ill health in her memoir Single Journey Only - the stamp on her one way exit visa from Germany. Her affluent south London upbringing was bounded by post-war restrictions on young women, a controlling father, and a mother who spent long periods in institutions.

-- Bridget Galton * Ham & High: Etcetera *

Ursula Owen, born in 1937, is a publisher, editor and campaigner for free expression. She was a founding director of Virago Press, Cultural Policy Advisor to the Labour Party, Director of the Paul Hamlyn Fund, Chief Executive of Index on Censorship and founder trustee of the Free Word Centre in London. She sits on the boards of Reprieve, Ledbury Poetry Festival, English Touring Opera and Carcanet Press.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781784631871
ISBN 10	1784631876
Title	Single Journey Only
Author	Ursula Owen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2019-09-15
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.