How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Name: How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
ISBN: 9781590514832

by Sarah Bakewell

National Book · 2010 · Winner

Bookshop.org Amazon Audible Libro.fm

Other PressNovember 9, 2010Biography & Memoir NonfictionISBN 9781590514832

Award History

Award	Year	Status	Citation
National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography	2010	Winner

About This Book

Sarah Bakewell's ingenious biography of Michel de Montaigne frames his life through twenty questions the essayist himself addressed. Drawing parallels between sixteenth-century France and our own moment, Bakewell makes Montaigne's philosophy of the self immediate and vital. Winner of the NBCC Award for Biography.

About the Author

Sarah BakewellBritish

Sarah Bakewell (born 1963) is a British author and former rare books curator, best known for her acclaimed nonfiction works blending biography, philosophy, and cultural history, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning How to Live: A Life of Montaigne (2010), At the Existentialist Café (2016), and Humanly Possible (2023). Born in Bournemouth, England, she spent part of her childhood traveling through Asia and living in Australia before studying philosophy at the University of Essex and working at London's Wellcome Library, which inspired her debut book The Smart (2001). She has received the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction (2018) and teaches creative writing at Oxford.