With a reporter’s and historian’s eye, award-winning author Redmer Yska presents Katherine Mansfield in metaphorical technicolour, revealing details of her life in Europe – her happy place where she produced her finest work – to a contemporary audience for the first time.

Beautifully written and illustrated, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost tale.

‘Europe was where Katherine Mansfield always thought and wrote best, where she tried – and failed – to outrun the disease that would kill her at 34.

‘In this book, I tried to get Mansfield out from behind the desk to show readers the gun-slinging, snooker-playing, skinny-dipping, chain-smoking foodie we see during earlier continental visits. But more than anything, I wanted to show how much her crisscrossing of Germany, Switzerland and especially wartime France fired her creativity. Despite her crippling TB infection, which saw her become addicted to legal morphine, she continued to work and explore her spirituality. Her imperishable writing, her reckless indomitability through it all, is simply extraordinary.’ – Redmer Yska

Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, Yska pursues her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees and knowledge-holders who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe.

Fascinating and accessibly written, Yska takes his reader along with him as he visits the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, towns, tobacco-stained cafes, fish markets, cake shops, slimy quaysides, train tracks and public gardens that were the background to some of Mansfield’s finest stories.

Hauntingly, these are also places where she suffered from piercing loneliness and homesickness, rooms in which she endured illness and extreme physical hardship, windows from which she gazed as she grappled with her mortality.

With maps and stunning photography, this engaging and deeply-researched book richly illuminates Katherine Mansfield’s time in Europe and reveals her enduring presence in the places she frequented.

Whether familiar or unfamiliar with Katherine Mansfield’s work and life, readers will find Yska’s account of her travels and travails in Europe freshly informative and profoundly moving.

‘Redmer Yska, once again, brings his sharp eye, his wry personal take, to the facts and legends of Katherine Mansfield. With her stories in hand, he traces how she survives in the places that were deeply important to her. This book is a delight – never solemn, always alert to even the faintest whispers among buildings and memories.’ – Sir Vincent O’Sullivan [co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield] ‘I’ve just finished reading your book and I’m absolutely blown away by it. What a wonderful journey you take us on.’ – Kathleen Jones [author of Katherine Mansfield:The storyteller]

Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station by Redmer Yska | Otago University Press | 2 May 2023 |$50

For author interviews, extract enquiries, review copies or for further information please contact: Penny Hartill – director hPR 021 721 424, penny@hartillpr.co.nz