Sylvie Simmons

 

 

 

 

 

Sylvie Simmons is a renowned music journalist and award-winning writer. A Londoner, she moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s where she began writing about rock music for Sounds, Creem and Kerrang!, then Rolling Stone, the Guardian and MOJO. She is the author of fiction and non-fiction books, including the acclaimed Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass, the short story collection, Too Weird for Ziggy, and her latest, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.

The legend behind such songs as ‘Suzanne’, ‘Bird on the Wire’ and ‘Hallelujah’ and the poet and novelist behind such ground-breaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life—sex, religion, power, meaning, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: both a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies’ man, and an ordained Buddhist monk, whose name, Jikan, means ‘ordinary silence’.
I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen is the definitive account of an extraordinary life. Sylvie Simmons has crafted a portrait of Cohen as nuanced as the man himself, drawing on a wealth of research that includes his personal archives and more than 100 exclusive interviews with those closest to Cohen—from his lovers, friends, monks, professors, rabbis and fellow musicians to his muses, including Rebecca De Mornay, Marianne Ihlen, Suzanne Elrod and Suzanne Verdal—and, most important, with Cohen himself, whose presence infuses the pages of the book.

Sylvie Simmons: Stories from the Life of Leonard Cohen
Tuesday 14 May, 8.00pm  $20
Middleton Grange School
Tickets: Dash Tickets

sylviesimmons.com

Interview on Afternoons with Jim Mora

The Press Christchurch Writers Festival has partnered with Auckland Writers and Readers Festival to bring Sylvie Simmons to New Zealand.