Alice Maddicott is a writer and artist from Somerset, England and the author of Cat Women and Tender Maps (July 2023).
Tender Maps
Travels in Search of the Emotions of Place
What do we mean when we talk about atmosphere? A unique piece of travel writing weaving memoir, literature, art and psycho-geography.
Of all the places where I feel the translucency of things, places that are thin for me, bluebell woods are first among them.
Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or to see a city’s sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music, literature and art.
Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to place, this extraordinary book explores the author’s relentless travelling, from the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan. With her uniquely lyrical approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with landscape that is the very essence of human creativity.
From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo Calvino and L. M. Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is a beautifully evocative book of travel, culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place.
Praise for Tender Maps
A rich and beguiling work of literary travel memoir that nimbly tracks the wider contours of the world in terms of feeling, memory, introspection and the imagination.
Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Vanishing Places
Cat Women
An Exploration of Feline Friendships and Lingering Superstitions
Late one summer Alice Maddicott was adopted by a beautiful old tabby cat called Dylan and together they shared six years of loving friendship.
Alice collected second-hand photos – orphan images – and in her sadness after Dylan’s death, she pored over old photographs of women and their cats. Cats in gardens, cats on laps, cats in alleys and on steps, accompanied by women who were diffident and affectionate, fierce and whimsical, young and old.
What did these cats mean to these women who cared for them? Why have cat-owning women always been viewed with suspicion? And where did the Crazy Cat Lady stereotype come from when other cultures revere rather than fear this relationship. Feminist, literary and tender, Cat Women is a beautiful hymn to the feline and the female, the wild natures and domestic affections of this most beguiling of creatures and the women who love them.
Praise for Cat Women
A magical, thoughtful, and gloriously wonderful little book.
Liz Robinson, Lovereading
I adored this stylish and thoughtful little tribute to women and their cats… Looking at these images of these mostly anonymous women and their beloved felines…is also unexpectedly moving.
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
Alice Maddicott
Alice’s work has spanned poetry, fiction and non-fiction (including travel and nature writing for Elsewhere Journal and the Waymaking anthology), writing installations and public art commissions such as The Car Boot Museum, and children’s television scripts (The Large Family, The Clangers).
Alice also has nearly two decades experience teaching, managing and fundraising for creative education projects across the country. Past and current clients include: Bath Festivals, The Roman Baths, Halsway Manor National Centre for Folk Arts, 5x5x5=Creativity, Somerset Art Works, The Eden Project and many more.
Agent
Jon Curzon at Artellus
General enquiries
For general enquiries about Cat Women or Tender Maps please contact September Publishing.
