Portraits from Paris: School and Travel Remembered from the City of Light

Written between 2019 and 2024, Portraits from Paris is a novelized memoir of a boarding-school childhood in 1970s England, interspersed with journalistic sketches of cities as diverse as Montevideo, Kolkata, and Moscow that draw from the travel-studded years between school and the author’s move to France. Along the way, Gavin Cologne-Brookes reflects on historic events ranging from Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the death of the queen, the restoration of Notre-Dame, and the Paris Olympics. Binding the personal and political together is an oil painter’s rendering of his creative evolution, building with careful brushwork upon the tints of the craft’s discovery in adolescence to arrive at the nuanced hues of artistic maturity.

Gavin Cologne-Brookes is professor emeritus at Bath Spa University. Educated in England and the United States, he moved to Paris in 2019 to pursue his passion for oil painting. His portraits of Arthur Miller, William Styron, Joyce Carol Oates, and Bruce Springsteen are on loan display at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.