This is a story about how to begin.

In 1921, Elisabeth Ephrussi writes a letter to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She too is a poet, or an aspiring one – a young law student in Vienna just beginning her creative life. To her surprise, Rilke writes back with advice. A five-year correspondence follows, an exchange of lyrical and exhortatory letters alongside books, translations, poems in manuscript. They never meet.

Fifty years later, Elisabeth’s grandson, Edmund de Waal, wants to be a poet and a potter. He sends her his own poetry, and she responds with guidance and Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

How to Begin follows Edmund’s journey as an artist. This is a book about failure, about starting again, about apprenticeship and asking for and then disregarding advice, about working out ways to keep going when you don’t know how. It is for any reader starting out, seeking the permission to begin.

Edmund de Waal is a contemporary artist, potter and author. His family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and has sold over a million copies worldwide. The White Road, a journey into the history of porcelain, was followed by the Sunday Times-bestselling Letters to Camondo.

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