The Wind At My Back

A Cycling Life

Paul Maunder

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Sport
25 July 2018

Memoirs; Cycling

A lone cyclist, disappearing into a wild landscape – brave, free, engaged with the world. It’s the kind of image that sells bikes, magazines, clothing; a romantic image that all cyclists aspire to. For cycling is an activity deeply and intimately involved with landscape. The bicycle allows us to explore, to engage with wild places, and return in time for dinner. It also allows us to investigate our surroundings closer to home.

It is an activity which, for most of us, happens at a speed that allows a great deal of voyeurism. We peer into houses and shops, gardens and farmyards, fields and hedgerows. What we see may be familiar or alien, but for the creative mind it is always stimulating. Yet – unlike with walking or swimming – the connection between cycling and creativity has only been explored in fragments.

On a bicycle, as one is exposed to sights – new or otherwise, through chance or purposeful searching – the repetitive physical actions of cycling work on the mind in a different way to those of walking. The shape of a long ride can become the shape of a novel; the atmosphere imbued by the weather, the hills, the physical exertion, can all influence a writer’s tone. Our memories have a dialogue with the landscape; we remember rides through the landscape, and the landscape shapes our thinking. And for Paul Maunder – a writer all his adult life – cycling and creativity have always been interlinked.

In The Wind on Your Back, Maunder takes a journey from the most dense centres of population to the wild places; starting from cycling in a major city, then moving through suburbia, the edgelands at the periphery of the city, then into the managed and pastoral farmland, and beyond to the sublime mountains.

He explores the experience and history of cycling in these different types of place, and seeks to understand how cycling has played a role in his own creative life as well as that of other cyclist-artists, musicians, photographers, writers and painters. Played out against the backdrop of the British countryside, and drawing of elements of psychogeography and human geography, Maunder seeks to understand the way the outside world interacts with the creative mind, and the way our surroundings help to shape who we are.

By: Paul Maunder
Imprint: Bloomsbury Sport
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm,
Weight: 397g
ISBN: 9781472948137
ISBN 10: 1472948130
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 25 July 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paul Maunder is a writer and journalist, contributing regularly to Peloton, Soigneur and Rouleur magazines. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, where he studied with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott. In 2011 he was awarded a Faber Fellowship, and he is currently working on his fifth novel. His first non-fiction book, Rainbows in the Mud, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

Reviews for The Wind At My Back: A Cycling Life

Paul Maunder’s exceptional meditation on his cycling life is immensely more rewarding than his sporting focus might suggest. He writes wonderfully about the world on two wheels, that’s for sure, and how the physical effort involved enhances creativity just as much as it raises the pulse – but the view from his saddle also encompasses the joys, pains and disappointments of the wannabe novelist and the family man, the solaces of traffic, solitude and hills, and that yearning we all share to both belong and be unbound. * Jim Crace, award-winning novelist and writer * A lyrical meditation on cycling ... one that ponders why cycling isn't so much a hobby for some, as an all-encompassing way of life. Those who also worship at cycling's great altar will find much to marvel at - as well as relate to - in this thoughtful, passionate book. * Bikes Etc * In a two-wheeled response to much great current writing about man and landscape, Paul Maunder’s engaging memoir argues that cycling, because of its innate connection with civilisation, is a perfect cipher for our feelings about the natural world…it does make you want to get on your bike. * The Observer * A meandering, pleasant memoir that takes in the landscape as he [Maunder] experiences it, with anecdotes and references along the way. * FT Weekend *