Top 50 title for Wright

Ghost Dance, the 2004 memoir by dancer and choreographer Douglas Wright, has been selected in Richard Canning’s Fifty Gay & Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson Books, New York, 2009). ‘This untypical autobiography is utterly idiosyncratic, utterly urgent, utterly beautiful…[a] finely contoured digression: Buddhism, bird-watching, immune deficiency, Janet Frame, the London tube, a difficult adolescence, Nijinsky, paganism…Ghost Dance displays a most beguiling critical intelligence. For Wright is that rare thing: the prodigy who won’t be schooled; the self-taught, polymath individual.” Other authors in the selection include Arthur Rimbaud, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Evelyn Waugh, and Gore Vidal. Craig Potton has just published an account of the 2006 New Zealand tour of Wright’s opus Black Milk, centred around John Savage’s photographs and Leonard Wilcox’s text. Picture: Adrian Malloch