Bibliography
Books
Title
Publisher
Date
Description
Perdendosi

Hazel Press, Cambridge

2022

Perdendosi is a collaborative work by photographer Norman McBeath with Edmund de Waal. It is a study of leaves at the stage of their transformation when they have lost all colour, and become more like parchment than plant, taking up the most extraordinary shapes, giving the leaves unique identities and character. Many of the photographs were taken at the start of the pandemic in a time of daily news of increasing deaths and infections. Although not a direct response, this time had a profound influence on how Norman McBeath saw the leaves. Edmund de Waal’s accompanying text ‘Twelve Leaves’, which he describes as both autobiography and a journal of reading, is his own unique and moving response to living with these images for several months during lockdown. With a heightened awareness and increased sensitivity towards the natural world, ​Perdendosi offers a fresh perspective on the familiar.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 549 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 550 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 551 WEB
Poor Crisp

Cuckoo Press, London

2021

Published by The Cuckoo Press, based at John Sandoe Books, London, this book touches on shards, an unfortunate eighteenth century potter called Nicholas Crisp and the fragments that Robert Walser used to make his stories.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 531 WEB
Letters to Camondo

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Chatto & Windus, London

2021

Letters to Camondo is a haunting sequence of imagined letters to the Count de Camondo – the owner of a Parisian palace filled with beautiful objects, turned into a memorial for his lost son.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 511 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 518 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 512 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 513 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 515 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 516 WEB
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 517 WEB
wavespeech

Wunderkammer Press, Bath

2018

wavespeech is an artist-signed and numbered publication in a limited edition of 200 that celebrates the collaboration between between Edmund de Waal and David Ward at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 310 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 305 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 304 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 293 Web
The White Road

Chatto & Windus. London; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York

2015

De Waal's second book, The White Road was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015 and was aired on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. It follows de Waal's journey to discover the history of porcelain, from porcelain first made in the hills of Jingdezhen in China to the first makers of English porcelain, William Cookworthy and Josiah Wedgwood.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 042 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 043 Web
Edmund de Waal

Phaidon, London

2014

The most comprehensive survey of Edmund de Waal's career to date. Texts by Emma Crichton-Miller, Colm Toíbín, Peter Carey, A.S. Byatt, Alexandra Munroe, Deborah Saunt and Edmund de Waal.


Edmund De Waal Book Archive 146 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 147 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 148 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 149 Web
The Pot Book

Phaidon, London

2011

This visual anthology of 300 ceramic vessels reveals this to be a magnificent truth. Pots are some of the very earliest artefacts created, and the span of our cultures can be traced through bowls and vases, dishes and beakers, made, glazed and decorated with lyricism and with vigour. They have been made to celebrate rituals of birth, marriage and death, and to be part of the rhythm of our solitary and our social times of eating and drinking. This book shows how inexhaustible the vessel has been for potters, sculptors, artists, designers and architects.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 138 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 139 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 142 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 144 Web
The Hare with Amber Eyes

Chatto & Windus, London; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York

2010

Edmund de Waal's family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, has won many literary prizes including the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award and has been translated into 29 languages.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 032 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 033 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 034 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 035 Web
20th Century Ceramics

Thames & Hudson, London

2003

This essential introduction to one of the most popular and challenging art forms of our time charts the development of ceramics in the modern age, from Art Nouveau, Art Deco, the Bauhaus and Futurism, through Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Performance, to Land Art and Installation Art. There are clear introductions to pioneering techniques, glazes and approaches, in context and in practice, from orientalism and colour theory, to Modernism, Postmodernism and the profuse diversity of the end of the twentieth century. In it Edmund de Waal examines the increasing cross-fertilization between ceramics and other disciplines, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, and provides detailed and compelling analysis of individual pieces in context.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 131 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 132 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 133 Web
Bernard Leach: British Artists Series

Tate Publishing, London

1997 (reprinted 2003 and 2013)

Bernard Leach was the pre-eminent artist-potter of the last century. This book by Edmund de Waal examining Leach's career includes full colour illustrations of all Leach’s best-known work.

Edmund De Waal Book Archive 135 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 136 Web
Edmund De Waal Book Archive 137 Web
Essays
Title
Publisher
Date
Description
Lettres à Camondo

Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris

2021

Catalogue essay from De Waal's exhibition of installations by made especially for its rooms and collections of the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris.

– one way or other –

MAK Center, West Hollywood

2018

Text which accompanied De Waal's 2018 installation at the Schindler House, Los Angeles.

white island

Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa, Ibiza

2018

Exhibition text for the 2018 exhibition of the same name at Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa, Ibiza.

casualty list

Academy of Arts, Berlin

2017

In 2017, the Academy of Arts in Berlin presented an exhibition examining the relationship between the critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and the writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). The exhibition included a number of contemporary artworks, including de Waal's casualty list from 2017, and this essay about the work appeared in the catalogue.

During the Night

Kunshistoriches Museum, Vienna

2016

Exhibition catalogue text for Edmund de Waal's curated exhibition, During the Night, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

atmosphere

Turner Contemporary, Margate

2015

Exhibition text for de Waal's installation at Turner Contemporary, Margate.

Lichtzwang

Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna

2014

Exhibition text to accompany Lichtzwang, a piece made by Edmund de Waal to hang in the Theseus Temple in Vienna as part of a series of contemporary installations. Exhibition text to accompany Lichtzwang, a piece made by Edmund de Waal to hang in the Theseus Temple in Vienna as part of a series of contemporary installations.

You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start.

Phaidon, London

2014

Edmund de Waal's essay from the monograph published by Phaidon in 2014.

On White: Porcelain Stories from the Fitzwilliam Museum

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

2013

Catalogue text to accompany the exhibition of the same name in which de Waal re-curated displays of the Fitzwilliam Museum's permanent collection with poetry, hidden letters, photographs and objects from his residency in Jingdezhen, China.

A local history

University of Cambridge

2012

Text to accompany A local history, a permanent installation of three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University.

Something else, somewhere other

Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire

2012

Catalogue text to accompany Edmund de Waal's series of installations at Waddesdon Manor.

Black Mountain College and the crafts

Arnolfini / Kettle's Yard

2006

Edmund de Waal's catalogue essay for the 2006 Arnolfini / Kettle's Yard exhibition, Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57, on the importance of the Black Mountain College.

Terra Incognita

Tate Liverpool

2004

Edmund de Waal's essay, Terra Incognita, accompanied Tate Liverpool's 2004 exhibition A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley. The essay has since appeared in reworked form in the catalogue for the exhibition Kneaded Knowledge: The Language of Ceramics at the Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, in 2016 and the National Gallery of Prague in 2017.

Articles
Title
Publisher
Date
Description
Edmund de Waal on his rise to becoming the world’s most in-demand potter

The Telegraph

16 October 2023

By Jessamy Calkin. While his life is a whirl of exhibitions and book tours, de Waal’s ceramics communicate an almost mystical calm – as does his studio.

Interview with Sally Mann

Whitehot Magazine

16 October 2023

By Gary Ryan. I briefly met and spoke with Sally Mann at the opening of her joint show with Edmund de Waal at Gagosian uptown on Madison Avenue, where she expressed openness toward an interview for Whitehot Magazine. The same evening I also met Putri Tan of Gagosian who had curated the show, who agreed to act as facilitator for said interview. The exhibition of their work is open through October 28th.

Edmund de Waal with Phong H. Bui

The Brooklyn Rail

1 October 2023

By Phuong H. Bui. Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwende, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.

Melting Pot

Monocle

1 October 2023

By Carolina Abbott Galvão. For author, artist and master potter Edmund de Waal, creation is a physical experience. “Clay is a gorgeous, messy untamed material,” he says at his office-cum-studio in London. “But so is language. I often think of the pressure between words when I put one next to the other or when I make spaces between them.”

An Alchemical Collaboration: Edmund de Waal and Sally Mann at Gagosian

Observer

12 September 2023

By Dian Parker. A new exhibition illustrates why the artists were drawn together.

Theaster Gates, Hanya Yanagihara, and Edmund de Waal on Isamu Noguchi’s legacy

Art Basel

29 June 2023

By Theaster Gates, Hanya Yanagihara, and Edmund de Waal. The annual Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes individuals from around the world whose work reflects the ingenuity, creativity, and social consciousness that Isamu Noguchi embodied as a pioneering artist of the 20th century. Marking its tenth year, the 2023 edition is honoring artist and writer Edmund de Waal, artist Theaster Gates, and novelist Hanya Yanagihara. Here, they share how Noguchi’s life and work has personally inspired them. From the courage that Noguchi demonstrated in America during World War II, which Yanagihara highlights, to his instinctive bond with natural materials that led de Waal to seek out Noguchi’s footsteps in Japan, and his knack for shaping public space into sites of communal play that influenced Gates early in his career.

In its 10th iteration the Isamu Noguchi Award honors Theaster Gates, Edmund de Waal, and Hanya Yanagihara

The Architect's Newspaper

8 May 2023

By Charles Gebbia. The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York has announced this year’s recipients of the annual Isamu Noguchi Award: contemporary artist Theaster Gates, author and artist Edmund de Waal, and writer Hanya Yanagihara. Celebrating its 10th year, the annual award recognizes individuals who share in Noguchi’s “spirit of innovation, unbounded imagination, and uncompromising commitment to creativity.”

There Will Be Mud: Contemporary Ceramics At The Hayward

The Quietus

19 November 2022

By Jennifer Lucy Allan. A new show on London’s South Bank brings together big names like Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal with lesser known ceramic artists, such as Lubna Chowdhary, Salvatore Arancio, and Klara Kristalova.

Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art — immediate, unpredictable and outrageous

Financial Times

4 November 2022
Strange Clay review – dynamic ceramic

The Observer

30 October 2022

By Laura Cumming. Twenty-three artists explore the potential of this ancient material in works tackling issues from Post-it note wars to feudalism and porn.

Strange Clay review – gleeful globs, erupting goo and an octopus in the toilet

The Guardian

25 October 2022

By Adrian Searle. This contemporary ceramics show has everything from beautiful pitchers and sexy pots to stupid knick-knacks.

Edmund de Waal’s plate collection for Wedgwood and the V&A

Financial Times

9 September 2022
The Wheel of History

Prospect

1 September 2022

By Hella Pick. "I have been making pottery all my life and in terms of identity, who I am and what I do, there is something very straightforward about sitting down at a potter’s wheel with a piece of clay and making something out of it."

Edmund de Waal addresses Jewish heritage in new collection of porcelain works

The Jewish Chronicle

9 June 2022

By Anthea Gerrie. The elegant works are to go on show at Waddesdon Manor, before taking up a permanent home in Israel.

Edmund de Waal Reconstructs History in “The Hare with Amber Eyes”

Art & Object

24 January 2022

By Howard Halle. Provenance refers to the chronology of ownership for a painting or other valuable, and the process of following custodial clues to establish its bona fides and historical importance. But along the way, provenance also reveals the lives of collectors involved, and the fortunes and fates that cling to the object like so many layers of drawing room dust.

At the Jewish Museum, an exhibition as much about what’s missing as what’s there

The Washington Post

7 January 2022

By Sebastian Smee. I walked into New York’s Jewish Museum late on a Monday afternoon, a few days before the end of 2021. It was dark outside — that cavernous Gotham gloom.

New York’s Jewish Museum Makes an Exhibition of The Hare with Amber Eyes

National Review

6 January 2022

By Brian T Allen. First published in 2010, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is partly history, partly an art story, partly a family memoir, and partly de Waal’s autobiography. Now this poignant, lyrical book is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. At its best, the book and the show — probing the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of a Jewish family, the Ephrussis — are about inheritance.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Brooklyn Rail

1 January 2022

By Jason Rosenfield. The Jewish Museum’s present show is a spinoff of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, the best-selling book from 2010 by the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, an elegant, erudite, auto-biographical, and equal parts devastating and elevating family memoir.

A Hare and an Inheritance, Once Hidden, at the Jewish Museum

The New York Times

31 December 2021

By Karen Rosenberg. Lovers of Edmund de Waal’s book can get close to that netsuke in a compelling show of objects that endured across a century of violence, discrimination and dispossession.

Survivors of a lost world

Financial Times

18 December 2021

By Ariella Budick.

Edmund de Waal: A man of letters

The New European

2 December 2021

By Florence Hallett. After the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes, potter and writer Edmund de Waal returns with an exhibition and book of fictional letters about a journey through grief.

The Hare with Amber Eyes at the Jewish Museum

The New Yorker

12 November 2021

Japanese netsuke—ivory carvings used as kimono ornaments—are at the heart of both the Edmund de Waal memoir and the show, opening Nov. 19.

An Ivory Figurine Leads the Way

The New York Times

24 October 2021

By Sophie Haigney. At the Jewish Museum, a book becomes an art exhibition examining the lives of the renowned Ephrussi family.

The Architect and the Hare

The New York Times

18 October 2021

By Celia McGee. Designing a show at the Jewish Museum in New York has illuminated corners of hidden history in her life, the architect says. “Edmund dug into his past. I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it.”

On my Radar

The Observer

10 October 2021

By Killian Fox. The ceramicist and writer on the poetry of Louise Glück, the music of Max Richter and the best secret meeting spot in London.

In Paris exhibit, Edmund de Waal gets rare invitation to alter a cherished space

Times of Israel

7 October 2021

By Renee Ghert Zand. UK artist is 1st to showcase work at Musée Nissim de Camondo, which has remained unchanged since its 1936 dedication; he also penned a book of letters to its deceased benefacto​r.​

This Gallery Wants You to Touch the Art

Hyperallergic

17 May 2021

By Hakim Bishara. Curator Edmund de Waal invites visitors to touch the sculptures of Henry Moore, who emphatically believed in the importance of tactile experience in enjoying works of art.

Henry Moore Foundation Edmund de Waal Show Set To Open

Artlyst

12 May 2021

Edmund de Waal has placed Moore’s words ‘tactile experience is very important as an aesthetic dimension in sculpture’ at the heart of his exhibition, which also showcases the iconography of the hand in Moore’s works. The postponement will allow visitors to touch works by the sculptor, as originally planned, not exactly a good idea at present.

Connects us to the Ancient Past through touch

The I

12 May 2021

By Florence Hallett. In the volumes and contours of Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure: Hand (1979), the traces of countless objects – stones, bones, gnarled wood, sculpture – reveal themselves beneath your fingers. The bronze swells and subsides, sending your arm on a rollercoaster ride, then bringing it to rest at some feature that nestles in the palm of your hand, or invites the touch of outstretched fingers.


The French Count Who Turned His Home Into a Museum to Honor His Dead Son

New York Times

11 May 2021

By Maurice Samuels. Three unwieldy boxes of porcelain collect dust in the basement of my building. Sealed away after my grandmother’s death 30 years ago, they contain rococo lamps, fragile urns and multiple sets of gilt-edged china that can’t go in the dishwasher.

Magical, imaginary letters coloured with inspiration

The Australian

6 May 2021

By Carmel Bird. As in The Hare With Amber Eyes, the narrator, the reader, and the central character of Camondo are strangely all present, connected and somehow intimate.

From family home to mausoleum: the Musée Nissim Camondo

The Spectaor

6 May 2021

By Laurel Berger. The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo. Ten years after the publication of his debut memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, he is once again in Paris, lurking about the rue de Monceau, ruminating on dust, trying to make the dead speak.

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal review – Proustian evocation of the belle époque

The Observer

2 May 2021

By Tim Adams. The potter and memoirist’s exacting study of a Parisian family’s collection of art objects is an exquisite coda to The Hare With Amber Eyes.

Intimate Objects: New Memoirs from Edmund de Waal and Marina Warner

Art Review

28 April 2021

By Oliver Basciano. Restitution and the long shadows of history preoccupy two leading British authors.

Book of the week: Letters to Camondo

The Week

23 April 2021

Edmund de Waal pens a unique companion volume to his 2010 bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Books that made me

The Guardian

23 April 2021

By Edmund de Waal. The artist, potter and author on his middle-of-the-night anxiety reading, wanting to be a poet, and the Japanese classic he wishes he had read,

Mon cher Monsieur

London Review of Books

22 April 2021

By Julian Barnes. In 2016, Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal book review

Evening Standard

20 April 2021

By Ian Thomson. This beautiful book by the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, about the banking family known as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ opens a window onto an entire lost world.


De Waal's Beautiful Bloodless World

The Telegraph

18 April 2021

By Rupert Christiansen. The artist returns to the belle époque turf of The Hare with Amber Eyes, this time writing imaginary letters to a Jewish collector in Paris.

Book review: Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal

The Scotsman

17 April 2021

By Allan Massie. Edmund de Waal charts the extraordinary lives of the Jewish Camondo family, who became high society philanthropists in Paris before tragedy and then horror visited them.

Potter and writer Edmund de Waal on his family’s Holocaust nightmare

The Times Magazine

17 April 2021

By Louise Carpenter. Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes was an international bestseller. During the solitude of lockdown, the celebrated writer and potter found himself returning to his devastating family history and the fate of his Jewish forebears. Louise Carpenter meets him in his studio.

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal review – a superb, sensitive account

The Guardian

15 April 2021

By Nicholas Wroe. From Proust and Parisian riches to the horror of the Holocaust ... this companion study to The Hare With Amber Eyes is the skilfully told story of a family’s collection of art objects.

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal, review — a follow-up to The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Sunday Times

11 April 2021

By Johanna Thomas-Corr. Ten years after the release of hus bestselling family memoir, this author returns to fin-de-siècle Paris.

The tragedy of Jewish art collectors in pre-war Paris

The Economist.

10 April 2021

Three books portray a glittering, doomed world.

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal review — a new companion piece to The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Times

10 April 2021

By Laura Freeman. The potter and author turns an artist’s eye to the life of a belle époque count.

Letters to Camondo and The House of Fragile Things — object lessons

Financial Times

8 April 2021

By Jackie Wullschlager. Two books offer intimate yet contrasting histories of Jewish art collectors in fin-de-siècle and early 20th-century France.

After Hours in the Museum

Literary Review

1 April 2021

By Gillian Tindall. Edmund de Waal is an internationally known potter, but through investigative energy and a sense of obligation he has also become the chronicler of his Jewish ancestors.

‘I feel bereft after selling my family treasures'

Daily Telegraph

12 March 2021

By Chris Harvey. The author and potter talks about life without some of the 'netsuke' that inspired his bestselling memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes.

The muse of displacement: Edmund de Waal’s ‘library of exile’

Financial Times

12 March 2021

By William Atkins. A migratory installation explores how the loss of homeland has inspired and encumbered writers.

British Museum reveals Edmund de Waal artwork dedicated to books by exiled writers – including The Tiger Who Came To Tea

Evening Standard

9 March 2021

By Robert Dex. The Tiger Who Came to Tea has come to the British Museum as part of an artwork dedicated to exiled writers.

Library closures are 'violent and vile', says Edmund de Waal

The Guardian

9 March 2021

By Mark Brown. Artist criticises ‘heartbreaking’ loss of libraries as he opens installation at British Museum.

Edmund de Waal on breaking pots, a precious netsuke and his latest exhibition

The Times

7 March 2021

By Jack Johnstone. When Edmund de Waal was a struggling young potter he lived for five years in Sheffield, the cheapest city he could find, making and selling ceramic honey jars.

‘It changed my life’: Edmund de Waal on writing The Hare With Amber Eyes

The Guardian

22 February 2021

By Edmund de Waal. Before writing his bestselling memoir, the potter and author had not realised that losing the thread of a family was so universal.

Artist Edmund de Waal Donates 2,000 Books to Iraqi Library Decimated by ISIS

Hyperallergic

26 January 2021

By Valentina Di Liscia. The artist donated his “library of exile” to the Mosul University Library, once one of the largest libraries in West Asia, housing over a million books and rare historical materials, before it was destroyed.

Out of reach but still gorgeously tactile

The I

7 January 2021

By Florence Hallett. The artist’s winter pots were made to be handled but are now viewed through the gallery’s window, from the street.

My culture fix: Edmund de Waal

The Times

2 January 2021

By Edmund de Waal. My favourite author or book: It has to be the poems of Paul Celan. He was born in Romania and his Jewish family were murdered in the Holocaust.

Edmund de Waal and Jacqueline Poncelet — peace and disquiet

Financial Times

25 September 2020

By Melanie Gerlis. The artists discuss their exhibitions at the New Art Centre near Salisbury, which explore tactility, reflection and horror.

De Waal Takes Still Life in a New Direction

The Telegraph

18 September 2020

By Lucy Davies. The Wiltshire sculpture park is a perfect fit for the complex, contrasting work of Edmund de Waal and Jacqueline Poncelet.

A ceramicist of nowhere: Edmund de Waal’s art of empathy

Prospect

18 July 2019

By Andrew Dickson. In the colonnaded central courtyard at the Frick Collection in New York, Edmund de Waal seems a little agitated. It is morning on an early summer Thursday; gauzy light filters through the glass roof on to the glossy marble floors beneath.

Edmund de Waal’s Venetian Tableaux

New York Review of Books

18 June 2019

By Lisa Appignanesi. The history of Venice’s Jewish Ghetto reverberates through writer and artist Edmund de Waal’s two site-specific installations. They go by the joint name of “Psalm,” those biblical poems and prayers of exile that are core to all three Abrahamic faiths and are haunted both by memories of loss and hopes of refuge, sometimes of retribution.

In Venice, a “library of exile” reflects on displacement and language

The Economist

15 May 2019

By F.R. Edmund de Waal’s latest installation is a hymn to writers in exile: a porcelain “library” with 2,000 books in translation.

Edmund de Waal’s 2,000-book installation of exiled writers will tour to the British Museum

The Art Newspaper

9 May 2019

By Gareth Harris. A library housing 2,000 books by exiled writers on show in Venice, assembled by the writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal, will tour to the British Museum in London and the Japanisches Palais in Dresden.

Edmund de Waal’s library of exile brings to light lost literature in Venice

Wallpaper*

7 May 2019

By Emma O'Kelly. The British artist and author is paying tribute to the ‘heart’ of the Jewish Ghetto at the 58th Venice Biennale with a duet of exhibitions.

The White Stuff

Financial Times

4 May 2019

By Jan Dalley. The ceramicist and writer talks about exile, belonging — and his longtime ‘obsession’ with porcelain.

A new window on Venice’s ghetto life

The Jewish Chronicle

2 May 2019

By Keren David. The studio of the British ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal is a large, bright space, a former munitions factory in deepest South London, walls painted in “Homebase white”. We’re here to talk about an utterly different place.

A library of exile: Edmund de Waal on Venice's Jewish Ghetto

The Guardian

24 April 2019

By Edmund de Waal. My day begins in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo. It is early morning and I am nursing a cup of coffee and the first of my bag of almond dolci ebraici veneziani, still warm from the bakery.

Top 10 dance shows of 2018

The Guardian

17 December 2018

By Judith Mackerell and Lyndsey Winship.

Edmund de Waal rethinks living and making at the Schindler House

Artforum

30 October 2018

By Grant Johnson. Writer and artist Edmund de Waal creates delicate porcelain vessels decisively arranged in meditative metal displays evocative of the conceptual intersection of Minimalist sculpture and modern craft.

Edmund de Waal's Netsuke, immortalised in his memoir, go on sale

Financial Times

19 October 2018

By Melanie Gerlis. Major consignments to next month’s bellwether auctions of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art in New York are mounting up, in expectation and hope of another bumper season (November 11-16).

Tutte le inquietudini della notte. Edmund de Waal a Vienna

Artribune

9 December 2016

By Giorgia Losio. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna – fino al 29 gennaio 2017. Abbiamo trascorso la notte nel museo austriaco in compagnia dell’artista britannico Edmund de Waal, che ha approfondito il tema della sua mostra, “During the night”, attraverso le reazioni di curatori, scrittori, storici e psicanalisti. Con un intermezzo musicale di Franz Bartolomey, primo violoncello dell’orchestra filarmonica di Vienna.

Devil In A Glass Germania Prima Metà Del Xvii Secolo Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna 696X465
De donkere kamer van Edmund de Waal

nrc.nl

25 November 2016

By Caroline de Gruyter. Voor het kunsthistorisch museum in Wenen stelde kunstenaar/schrijver Edmund de Waal een magnifieke tentoonstelling samen over angst.

2511Cul Edmunddewa
Der Teufel im Glas

Wiener Zeitung

24 October 2016

By Christa Hager. "During the Night": Edmund de Waal presents an extraordinary exhibition on fear at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

De Waal: „In Wien wurde Angst erfunden“

Die Presse

2 October 2016

By Almuth Spiegler. Edmund de Waal, Bestsellerautor und Keramikkünstler, erzählte der „Presse am Sonntag“, was er von Kritikern hält. Und warum sein „Hase“ als Talisman über seine KHM-Ausstellung wacht.

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Ai Weiwei and Edmund de Waal’s ceramics show

Phaidon

28 September 2016

The artists and ceramicists hope their new show will re-establish the medium's rightful place within fine art.

"Verfeinerung ist tödlich"

Zeit Online (Die Zeit)

29 May 2016

By Tobias Timm. Der Bestsellerautor Edmund de Waal ist auch ein Künstler, jetzt werden seine Werke in Berlin gezeigt. Ein Gespräch über Porzellan und Walter Benjamin.

At tænke med hænderne

Weekendasiven

7 May 2016

By Heidi Laura. Vi har mistet den fundamentale forbindelse til ting, som går gennem hænderne, mener keramikeren og forfatteren Edmund de Waal. Og derfor også forbindelsen til dem, som laver tingene, og til tingenes dybere historier, smukke som smertefulde.

Porcelana: La materia de la que están hechos los sueños

Panorámica

15 March 2016

By Javier Martín. Brillante, fina y traslúcida, la porcelana es sinónimo del lujo venido de Oriente. Desde los primeros comerciantes italianos hasta los intereses de los principales monarcas europeos en su fabricación, la historia del oro blanco puede también leerse como una historia obsesiva por poseerla y elaborarla.

Una obsesión hay que saberla llevar

El Pais

12 March 2016

By Jorge Morla. Los nazis destinaban leña a fabricarla aunque escaseara para los crematorios y obsesionó a los emperadores chinos. El escritor novela la historia de la porcelana.

La porcelana, deseo de reyes y poetas

La Vanguardia

6 March 2016

By Antonio Lozano. Tras el éxito de La liebre con ojos de ámbar, el autor, que también es artesano, se acerca en El oro blanco a uno de los secretos mejor guardados de Oriente.

50 Shades of Black, 50 Shades of White

Huffington Post

19 January 2016

By Edward Goldman. This is the story of his encounters with many people and places that help deepen his understanding of the nature of the material.

Back to black: Edmund de Waal plays with dark glazes in new body of work

Wallpaper*

14 January 2016

By Michael Slenske. ‘It’s come out of a lengthy period of thinking about architecture and music and all kinds of other things, so it’s a really big show for me.’

Read more at http://www.wallpaper.com/art/b...

The White Road: Journey Into an Obsession, by Edmund de Waal

San Francisco Chronicle

25 December 2015

By David D'Arcy. Much writing is about witnessing. For Edmund de Waal, it is also about holding something in your hands. That something is porcelain, the translucent white pottery that’s obsessed de Waal for his entire life. As a substance, it radiates the purity of something delicate and nearly weightless, seemingly ageless.

The Delicate Art of Memory

New Republic

1 December 2015

By James McCauley. Edmund de Waal’s new book is an odyssey into an obsession with porcelain.

An obsessive journey into the world of porcelain

Los Angeles Times

26 November 2015

By Geoff Nicholson. This is a terrific book. If you read it, you'll never look at porcelain the same way again.

Edmund de Waal and the Strange Alchemy of Porcelain

The New York Times Magazine

25 November 2015

By Sam Anderson. Coming from a more orthodox mind, de Waal’s stories, and his pots, might have turned out to be dull, dry, obscure, conventional and neatly contained. Instead, they are poetic and sprawling. The White Road is a verbal extension of his lifelong work in ceramics. The writing and the porcelain are inseparable now; they lean on one another like the inside and outside of a pot.

The Shape of Obsession

The Wall Street Journal

25 November 2015

By Ben Downing. Blending history, biography, autobiography, travel writing and multiple veins of meditation... it is a far cry from your grandmother’s coffee-table book on Lladró.

A pure obsession

The Seattle Times

22 November 2015

By Brian Thomas Gallagher. In The White Road, Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, chronicles humanity’s passion for porcelain, the fine pottery coveted through the ages by the wealthy and highborn, and his own life as a craftsman who works with the prized material.

The china syndrome: Edmund de Waal on the agony and ecstasy of porcelain

Toronto Star

22 November 2015

By Jennifer Hunter. De Waal’s book is poetic and has a stream-of-consciousness style as he considers the places and people around the world involved in the creation and use of porcelain.

The European Obsession with Porcelain

The New Yorker

11 November 2015

By Thessaly La Force. The real story of how porcelain was invented—and then reinvented and reinvented again—is offered up in Edmund de Waal’s new book “The White Road: Journey into an Obsession,” a breathless pilgrimage to, and history of, three very famous white hills.

Creator, curator and custodian

Times Literary Supplement

23 October 2015

By Ruth Guilding. Deeply absorbing and profoundly instructive.

Life on a plate

Observer Food Monthly

18 October 2015

By Alex Clarke. The book is a great deal more than a history; in it de Waal examines the cost ... of the material so highly prized for its purity that it was thought to banish poison.

Edmund de Waal’s poetic journey down ‘the White Road’

The Australian

17 October 2015

By Miriam Cosic. The book is immersive and slightly hallucinatory. The text is as incantatory as poetry, a concatenation of places, eras, people, historical writings, physical objects, moods, the present and the past.

From buttons to porcelain, how Hare with Amber Eyes author found a new obsession

Belfast Telegraph

3 October 2015

By Brian Lynch. The White Road is not as accessible as The Hare with Amber Eyes, but the thinking that informs it is denser and even more illuminating.

Potter's progress

Apollo Magazine

1 October 2015

By Anne Gerritsen. The point of this pilgrimage, this white journey, is surely not just to tell us how it is possible to make white things, but to let us hear some of the conversations which are part of the making of porcelain.

Blanc slate

The Tablet

26 September 2015

By Michael Walsh. I already have it marked down, should anyone ask come December, as my book of the year.

Chasing Perfection

The Economist

26 September 2015

This allusive, complex book is a hybrid, neither a simple history, travelogue nor autobiography, but taking in elements of each as the author traces the stories of porcelain's development and his own fascination with those stories

Edmund de Waal’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning 2010 memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes

Sunday Express Magazine

25 September 2015

By Charlotte Heathcote. You don't want to stop reading because de Waal, with his sharp curator's eye, has excellent judgement when it comes to showing readers things that they will find fascinating, funny or moving.

Undone by porcelain

The Oldie

20 September 2015

By Charles Darwent. This [book] tells not one story but two: that of other people... the inventors, makers and consumers of porcelain, and the author's own.

The White Road by Edmund de Waal

Sunday Express Magazine

20 September 2015

By Jack Kerridge. "You don't want to stop reading because de Waal, with his sharp curator's eye, has excellent judgement when it comes to showing readers things that they will find fascinating, funny or moving."

A Terrible Beauty

The Spectator

19 September 2015

By A.S. Byatt. De Waal's The White Road finds the history of porcelain manufacture shrouded in secrecy and littered with terrible disasters.

A terrible beauty

The Spectator

19 September 2015

By A. S. Byatt. "A.S. Byatt on the dark deadly secrets lurking behind a cool, white surface"

A potter's pilgrimage on the white road

The Times

19 September 2015

By Tristram Hunt. This book is certainly the finest account of the many meanings of porcelain to the modern world that I have read.

The White Stuff

The Financial Times

19 September 2015

By AN Wilson. ...an intensely personal history of porcelain.

Fragile Price of Beauty

The Independent

19 September 2015

By Ekow Eshun. A mesmerising and cautionary tale about the obsessive pursuit of white china.

Ceramic alchemy

The New Statesman

18 September 2015

By Olivia Laing. White is a dangerous colour – and de Waal's journey shows the human cost of porcelain.

The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

Publishers Weekly

14 September 2015

The book transforms an otherwise esoteric subject into a truly remarkable story.

The Great Waal of China

The Sunday Times Magazine

13 September 2015

By Christina Patterson. The White Road is a cultural history of porcelain, but it's also, as it's subtitle says, "a pilgrimage of sorts"...to the places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented.

The White Stuff

Country Life Magazine

12 September 2015

By Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Edmund de Waal has a way of making you care about handmade ceramics in a way no other writer does.

Magnificent Obsession

Monocle

1 September 2015

By Robert Bound. ...intriguing, unusual, heartfelt...

The White Road

Kirkus Reviews

1 August 2015

A lyrical melding of art history, memoir, and philosophical meditation.

El hombre que hablaba con la miniaturas

La Vanguardia Magazine

8 July 2012

By Xavi Ayen. El ceramista británico Edmund de Waal heredó de un tío suyo 264 netsukes, unas delicadas miniaturas japonesas. ¿Qué habrán visto desde que fueron creadas?, se preguntó.

Wie man den richtigen Ton findet

Welt am Sonntag

10 June 2012

By Thomas Schmid. Mit seiner Familiensaga "Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen" schrieb Edmund de Waal einen unverhofften Bestseller. Doch seine wahre Leidenschaft ist das Töpfern. Ein Portrait.

The Netsuke Survived

The New York Times

3 September 2011

By Roger Cohen. The odyssey of 264 netsuke — Japanese carvings not much larger than cherry tomatoes — lies at the heart of Edmund de Waal’s extraordinary book The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Runaway success

The Sunday Times

23 January 2011

By Ed Caesar. The Ephrussi family patronised Renoir and Proust, but lost everything in the war. Now their descendant has turned their story into a surprise bestseller.

Searching for a Lost World

New York Review of Books

14 October 2010

By Walter Kaiser. In the unexpected book he has now written about his ancestors, The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal’s artistic sensibility and historical empathy are as animating as they are in his ceramic craft.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Washington Post

2 September 2010

By Michael Dirda. The Hare With Amber Eyes belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, André Aciman's Out of Egypt and Sybille Bedford's A Legacy. All four are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Fabergé glass or Meissen porcelain -- or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke, those little Japanese figurines carved out of ivory or boxwood.

Tracing a grand family’s aspirations through its art

The Boston Globe

29 August 2010

By Richard Eder. At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust’s masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As withRemembrance of Things Past, it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.

264 Japanese Carvings, Revealing Family History

The New York Times

12 August 2010

12 August 2010By Eve M. Kahn. The rows of netsuke have influenced his ceramic work; he often groups his pots by color and size on museum and gallery shelves, like minimalist repeating brushstrokes. Viewers who know about his inheritance, he said, have told him: “Diasporic objects! You’re keeping your objects together, aren’t you?”

Inheritance of loss

The Sunday Telegraph

26 June 2010

By Brian Dillon. The ultimate message of his engrossing book is a profound one, however: that our lives are made and unmade in the company of things. “Touch tells you what you need to know – it tells you about yourself.”

Cabinet of marvels

The Guardian

26 June 2010

By Veronica Horwell. De Waal has a mystical ability to so inhabit the long-gone moment as to seem to suspend inexorable history, personal and impersonal.