Woke Up This Morning

Woke up this Morning is a hitch-hiker''s guide to cultural alienation, from Glasgow to London to San Francisco and back again.

Brian Docherty grew up in Scotland in the 1960s listening to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon on the radio, hitched across Europe in the 1970s, and then followed the Vikings West to Vinland in North America, that green utopia ''where everything seemed possible'', only to find himself caught in ''the blizzard of history''. The result is a series of studies in estrangement and exile, real and imagined: Stanley Spencer in Cookham, Dracula in Whitby, Gauguin on Tahiti, Otis Redding sitting on the dock of the Bay.

Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow in 1953, and educated at Middlesex Polytechnic, the University of Essex, London University and St Mary''s University College. He has worked as a civil servant, hospital storeman, market trader, Creative Writing tutor and lecturer. His first two books Armchair Theatre (1999) and Desk with a View (2008) were both published by Hearing Eye. He has co-edited several Macmillan anthologies, most recently British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art (1997). He lives in north London.