AN ADOLESCENT BOY sails to Mount Athos. His spiritual and erotic wanderings among the monasteries and remote hermitages of the Holy Mountain take both author and reader on a journey of self-discovery. Augiéras himself spoke of Athos as a place where you “find everything within yourself “, and of this book as “a sojourn in the Land of the Spirits according to the strictest Buddhist or Pythagorean Orthodoxy”. Described variously as an anti-Christian nomad, a barbarian in the West and a madman, Augiéras is one of France’s great underground writers. Like its author, Journey to Mount Athos is full of subtle, ancient wisdom.

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FRANÇOIS AUGIÉRAS was born in 1925 in Rochester, New York. His father was French, a pianist, his mother a Polish émigré. After his father died he returned to Paris, but spent his adolescence in Périgord, which was to be his refuge during a life of restless wandering. In 1945 he went to Algiers for a year, living with his reclusive uncle, a retired colonel, and in a Trappist monastery. This, and time spent with the monks of Athos, were profound influences both on his writing and his painting, often likened to “modern icons”. André Gide, who knew him, described his writing as “a bizarre delight”. Augiéras died in a hospice at Domme in 1971 aged forty-six.

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TRANSLATED BY Sue Dyson and Christopher Moncrieff
Cover illustration by Andres Serrano
ISBN 1 901 285 39 1