Jonathan Bradley is an author and former university academic. Jonathan was partly educated in France and he and his wife have owned property in the country for many years. His books include Papiliones and A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies, containing stories and poems inspired by butterflies, as well as Sibling Poets and City Sonnets, both of which are collections of poems. In this talk he will speak about some of the beautiful butterflies that can be seen in France and show a number of photographs of them. His next book on this subject, The Cardinal, Cleopatra and the Pasha, is due to be published later this year.
In the foreword to my book the author and naturalist Matthew Oates writes about this:
“Butterflies have long been in the poet’s eye. This fascination flows back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that the human soul departs from the body on the wings of a butterfly. They created Psyche, the goddess of the soul, from their word for a butterfly – psyche. There is also the symbolism of metamorphosis, which from a poetic angle is deeply profound, offering myriad possibilities and analogies with the human condition.”I’m inspired by their colour, their vulnerability, their delicacy, their symbolism and their capacity to arouse emotion in human beings, and then I feel like writing about them.
- Excerpt drawn from “an interview with: Jonathan Bradley, author of Papiliones.”
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