The Woman Who Always Loved Picasso

It is unusual for Carcanet to produce an illustrated book, and in this case to host so distinguished an illustrator and designer as Jeff Fisher. His drawings animate the vivid voice of Marie-Therese, created with great immediacy by Julia Blackburn. Marie-Therese was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was fortysix. The poems, simple in language - daubed as it were - make sense of Picasso's love for this young woman who was, John Berger says, 'the sexually most important affair of his life.' They assume the young woman's voice, taking up the story at their first meeting. We recognise some of his great paintings in their occasions and formation. Three years after his death she took her own life. Julia Blackburn has written two novels (both shortlisted for the Orange Prize); a memoir, The Three of Us (winner of the J.R. Ackerley Award), and nine works of non-fiction of which the most recent, Time Song, was published by Cape in 2019.