The Woman Who Always Loved Picasso

 Marie-Thérèse Walter was seventeen when she met Picasso. He was forty-six. These poems - as simple and direct as quick sketches - use her voice to tell the story of the relationship with Picasso and what it meant to her from its first beginnings, until the day on which she took her own life, three years after his death. The poems illuminate his love for a woman who was, as John Berger says, 'the sexually most important affair of his life'; they also, perhaps, make sense of Marie-Thérèse's love for him. Jeff Fisher's drawings animate the vivid voice of Marie-Thérèse, created with great immediacy by Julia Blackburn.

Julia Blackburn is the daughter of the poet Thomas Blackburn and the painter Rosalie de Meric. She has written two novels (both shortlisted for the Orange Prize), a memoir The Three of Us (winner of the JR Ackerley Award), a collection of poems, Murmurations of Love, Grief and Starlings (Full Circle, 2015) and nine works of non-fiction of which the most recent, Time Song, was published by Cape in 2019. She lives in Suffolk and in Italy.