Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880–91

By Charles Nicholl

In 1880 a taciturn young Frenchman arrives at the Yemeni port of Aden, where he finds work as a foreman in a coffee warehouse. He is the poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell – a notorious figure in France but now, at the age of twenty five, determined to start a new life. In this atmospheric study of Rimbaud’s ‘lost years’, Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of his life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in East Africa. We follow his trail in Somalia and Djibouti, in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo: a man on the run from his past, living out his famous teenage pronouncement, ‘Je est un autre’ – I is somebody else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781780601830

Charles Nicholl

Charles Nicholl has written twelve books of history, biography and travel. The Reckoning, an investigation of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, won the James Tait Black Prize for biography and the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Gold Dagger’ for non-fiction. His other books include an acclaimed biography of Leonardo da Vinci; a reconstruction of a sixteenth-century expedition in search of El Dorado; and the travel classic Borderlines, set in 1980s Thailand (also published by Eland) and The Fruit Palace, about life among the drug-smugglers of Colombia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sussex.