Padraig Rooney
Padraig Rooney’s The Gilded Chalet: Travels in Literary Switzerland was described in the TLS as “Brilliant. Thoroughly absorbing.” He has published four books of poems and won a number of prizes. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Scotsman and The New European. Rebel Angel: The Life and Times of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Polity, 2025) was praised by the Irish Times as “brilliant historical writing on global violence … prescient reading for our times”.
Rebel Angel: The Life & Times of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Polity)
Annemarie Schwarzenbach was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable women, possibly the greatest sexual and political radical of the 1930s. But until now she’s been largely ignored.
Born to a wealthy family in Switzerland, as a teenager she rebelled against her domineering pro-Nazi mother. She immersed herself in the antifascist, queer and artistic circles of the German diaspora of the 1930s. Her edgy glamour and androgynous beauty turned heads in the lesbian nightclubs of Weimar Berlin, on the ski slopes of St. Moritz, and in New York’s luxury hotels and jazz bars.
Constantly on the move, Annemarie chronicled the low and dishonest decade leading to war through her unique journalism, writing and photography. Her work was as adventurous and uncompromising as her personal life, and reveals a deep courage, intelligence, and ambition tragically curtailed by her untimely death.