Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal is an artist who writes. Much of his work is about the contingency of memory: bringing particular histories of loss and exile into renewed life. Both his artistic and written practice have broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics, as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry. De Waal continually investigates themes of diaspora, memorial and materiality with his interventions and artworks made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide including The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Museo Ebraico, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London.
De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), The White Road (2015), and Letters to Camondo (2021). an Archive (2025), published with Ivorypress, is a gathering of texts that reflect on his own family archives, and the archives of writers, artists, and spaces de Waal has spent years inhabiting.
His latest book, How to Begin (2026), is a story of beginning a creative life via a startling rediscovery in de Waal’s family archives – letters between his grandmother and the charismatic poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2023 he received the Isamu Noguchi Award. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
