How to Begin

‘I believe you can live in a book of poems’

A book about finding a creative voice and becoming an artist via a startling rediscovery in Edmund de Waal’s family archives – letters between his grandmother and the charismatic poet Rainer Maria Rilke

** With letters translated from the German by prizewinning translator, Karen Leeder **

This is a story about how to begin.

In 1921, Elisabeth Ephrussi writes a letter to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She too is a poet, or an aspiring one – a young law student in Vienna just beginning her creative life. To her surprise, Rilke writes back with advice. A five-year correspondence follows, an exchange of lyrical and exhortatory letters alongside books, translations, poems in manuscript. They never meet.

Fifty years later, Elisabeth’s grandson, Edmund de Waal, wants to be a poet and a potter. He sends her his own poetry, and she responds with guidance and Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

How to Begin follows Edmund’s journey as an artist. This is a book about failure, about starting again, about apprenticeship and asking for and then disregarding advice, about working out ways to keep going when you don’t know how.

It is a moving, intergenerational story about the traces of memory within a family, and a deeply personal reflection on how we learn resilience with the support of others. It is for any reader starting out, seeking the permission to begin.

'Enchanting, illuminating and tender' - Nigel Slater

© Edmund de Waal 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026