Ian Sansom

How has paper advanced civilization? What part has paper played in helping us make sense of the world? Is the age of paper coming to an end? Do e-books have it over paperbacks? Is paper beginning to disappear?

Author of the popular Mobile Library Mystery Series, regular writer for national broadsheets, broadcaster on Radios 3 & 4, former Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and now tutor at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast, Ian Sansom is author of Paper – an elegy, in which he curates the history of paper, reflects on its roles and meaning, and explores its paradoxes, its durability and its vulnerability, and shows how some kinds of paper will always be with us.