A City Under Olympic Siege

ain Sinclair’s been a writer for almost four decades, producing poetry, novels and non-fiction shading into fiction, examining themes of place and history and London. He’s not a typical historian; he writes about movies, gangsters, pulp novelists, graffiti, and urban evolution, all in a jagged style heavy on sentence fragments. He’s become an institution— collaborating with comics artist Dave McKean for his novel Slow Chocolate Autopsy, lending a character to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, putting together an anthology called London: City of Disappearances with contributions from Moore and Michael Moorcock and Sara Wise and Will Self and J.G. Ballard and Sinclair himself. It wasn’t surprising that his local library asked to host the launch of his book Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, which was a mix of autobiography and local history, explaining how Sinclair came to live in the Hackney area of London.