The Silence at the Song's End - Tapa dura

These are the collected journals and poetry of Nicholas Heiney who died in 2006, aged 23, after taking his own life. These vivid writings about his adventures on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, together with his poetry, remained undiscovered until after his death. His parents, Paul and Libby Heiney were urged to publish them by Prof. Duncan Wu of Oxford University, Nick s former tutor, who realized the depth and maturity in both his prose and poetry. It is, as he writes in his introduction, a powerful piece of writing, exemplary in its sanity and clear-sightedness .

Nicholas Heiney was born in 1982, the son of the journalists Paul Heiney and Libby Purves and brother of the actress and writer Rose Heiney. In the last six years of his life he sailed widely, crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific as a deckhand aboard the square-rigged barque Europa, and training young Koreans in seamanship. He learned to dive, rowed for his Oxford college, and enthusiastically took part in cycle racing. After his degree in English Language and Literature at St Catherine s College, Oxford, he studied for a short while as a postgraduate at Liverpool University,specializing in Imagist poetry, but became disillusioned with the literary critical industry, writing that Literature is often flamboyant and frivolous and should be written about in such a way . He took his life on the 26th June, 2006, after a long and well-concealed battle with severe mental disturbance.