For Daisy Rockwell, 'our friend, Art', as her father called it, was everywhere. This is a portrait of an extraordinary family of artists - her parents, and her grandfather, Norman Rockwell - and what it was like to grow up both in, and out, of their shadows. Drawing on their stories and those of her own life as an artist-writer, on photographs and paintings, from the polished and famous to the private and scribbled, she assembles a glittering mosaic of memories and images. Here are tales of loves, deaths and afterlives and, above all, of the constant need to create; to see the world differently.Deeply personal, and aglow with light and colour, this is a book about remaking life through art, and about what it means to tell our stories.



Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer and translator from Hindi and Urdu, living in Vermont. She is a recipient of the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award and her translations have been honoured with the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work and the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Her novel Alice Sees Ghosts and Mixed Metaphors, her collection of poems about translation, were published by Bloomsbury India in 2026.



Transfixing and often heartbreaking ... An exceptional meditation upon the fiction of family stories, the originality of the artist, garbled language and pearl-like translations, Daisy Rockwell introduces us to the all-embracing, and sometimes brutal, life of being friends with Art.



'[Rockwell has] the lightness, ease and spectral quality of Blake, and the surreality of Leonora Carrington. Yet her vision is unique.' 'Just as Babette's Feast makes the viewer hungry, so Our Friend, Art makes the reader reach for their soft pastels to relive the joys of creation.'