Shorter Lives’ histories of notable creators (and notable enablers of the creative) drift away from conventional tellings to offer alternative facts and believable untruths. No small part of the author’s extensive research, however, has been the trawling of existing biographies for unrepresentative, yet documented, instances of the bizarre.

In our post-truth world of fake news and mythmaking, Scott’s revised biographies make a significant contribution to both speculative fiction and the developing field of non-fiction poetry.