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Biography
British

Edmund de Waal

1964

A ceramicist and writer whose memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) — tracing the history of his family's collection of Japanese netsuke through five generations of the Ephrussi banking dynasty — became an international bestseller and one of the most acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction of the twenty-first century. De Waal's subsequent books explore the cultural histories of porcelain, libraries, and loss.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityBritish
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Edmund de Waal (born 1964) is a British ceramicist and writer. He studied at Cambridge and in Japan, where he apprenticed with a master potter. His ceramic installations — vast arrangements of porcelain vessels in vitrines — have been exhibited at the V&A, the Frick, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. But he is best known as the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), a genre-defining family memoir structured around a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke.

Major Works

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010, Chatto & Windus) traces the netsuke collection from its purchase in 1870s Paris by Charles Ephrussi — a cousin of Marcel Proust’s Charles Swann — through the family’s fin-de-siècle Vienna salon, the Nazi Anschluss and the confiscation of the Ephrussi fortune, to the postwar recovery of the netsuke by a family maid who hid them in her mattress. The book won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award, and was a finalist for numerous other prizes. It has been translated into over thirty languages.

The White Road (2015, Chatto & Windus) is a history of porcelain told through de Waal’s own journeys to the three places most associated with its creation: Jingdezhen, Dresden, and the English factories. It combines travel writing, art history, and material culture.

Letters to Camondo (2021, Chatto & Windus) addresses Moïse de Camondo, the Parisian banker whose house-museum survives in the Marais, and whose family perished in the Holocaust. The book is de Waal’s meditation on collecting, memory, and the fate of cultivated Jewish families in wartime Europe.

De Waal’s dual identity — practicing ceramicist and literary writer — gives his prose a distinctive materiality. He writes about objects the way a maker handles them: with attention to weight, surface, temperature, and the accumulated history that resides in physical things.

Key Works

  • The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)
  • The White Road (2015)
  • Letters to Camondo (2021)

Collecting de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes first editions (2010, Chatto & Windus, London) were modestly printed; fine copies with dust jacket bring $100–$300. The US edition (FSG, 2010) is less collected. Signed copies are fairly available through UK bookshops. De Waal also produces limited-edition artist’s books and ceramic-and-text collaborations that are collected in the art market rather than the book market — some of these are extraordinarily beautiful and can bring four-figure sums. His ceramic work is represented by major galleries and appears at auction regularly.