Katherine Rundell’s biography of the poet and "alchemist" of words John Donne. Today – a runaway wedding and an inauspicious start to a relationship that fuelled some of the most desire-filled poetry in English.

This prize-winning new biography of John Donne reveals him as an “infinity merchant”, a man whose preaching could make his congregation weep, a poet whose “beauty deserved walk-on music”.

Rundell's engaging, witty and often thrilling book champions an impossible to categorise man: pirate, soldier, scholar, priest, inventor of new words and author of some of most intensely and intimately passionate poetry in English. Donne was a Catholic who lost - or left - his faith, from a family of martyrs, whose career led him to become Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Read by Blake Ritson
Abridged by Richard Hamilton
Produced by Allegra McIlroy Show less