Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
**A Sunday Times top ten bestseller**
**Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2023**
**Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction 2023**
**Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize 2023**
'Every page sparkles.' Claire Tomalin
'Crackling with gusto and sympathetic intelligence' Andrew Motion
'A triumph.' Matt Haig
'Stylish, scholarly and gripping' Rose Tremain
'A wonderful, joyous piece of work.' Maggie O'Farrell
John Donne lived myriad lives.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of sadness, yet expressed in his verse electric joy and love.
From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed 'act of evangelism', showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times - unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.
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