Sarah Bakewell

Bakewell spent ten years cataloguing early printed books at the Wellcome Library before she wrote full time, and the habit of noticing the marginal and the odd shows everywhere in her work. How to Live approaches Montaigne through twenty attempts at an answer instead of a chronology, and took a National Book Critics Circle award. At the Existentialist Cafe does the same for Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger and their circle, and does not excuse Heidegger's politics. She treats ideas as things people lived rather than positions they held.