What is the burden of secrets? How do we excavate buried history? What does it mean to confront our ghosts? How to find, after everything, a reason to live?

In this extraordinary account, Dante’s granddaughter, the poet Maia Elsner, pieces together the artist’s life from interviews with him, his widow and family, as well as uncovering thousands of stunning raku pots and an incredible archive of paintings, drawings and sketches.

Dante Elsner (Guillemot Press, 2023). To order go to: https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/nonfiction/dante-elsner-maia-elsner

This spectacular book is a beautiful and haunting meditation on life, trauma, and art. Written with sensitivity and grace, Maia Elsner offers a stunning tribute to a grandfather's legacy, showing how stories travel from generation to generation, carrying the light of hope even in the darkest of times.

Ruth Behar, author of Letters from Cuba

Maia Elsner is a Mexican-Polish-Jewish-British writer whose debut collection Overrun by Wild Boars (Flipped Eye, 2021) won a Somerset Maugham Award. She is currently a Zell Fellow at the Helen Zell Writer's Program in Michigan, where her writing has won the Hopwood Award for non-fiction.