****SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE****SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEAMUS HEANEY FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE**'Fresh, urgent, alive... genius' PATIENCE AGBABI**This assured and arresting first collection moves deftly and with purpose into private, hidden places - a locked shed, the dark of a battery farm, a murky riverbed, a late-night bar - to show, unflinchingly and in cinematic detail, what we might otherwise choose not to see. Sight is both a gift and curse, of course: ...

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a d...

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationshi...

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occup...

These outstanding stories from the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize will provoke, stimulate, move, amuse, unsettle, and entertain

Exploring grief, yet neither bleak nor overwrought, this powerful short story won the 2013 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition. The judge, Carl Nixon, commended its 'seemingly effortless artistry' and its skilful and well-sustained handling of demanding narrative techniques: 'the author does not miss a beat', he said. Cleverly juxtaposing the past and present, the narrator draws the reader into her life. The judge concluded: 'Beautifully controlled use of simile and ...

Hugo Williams is rightly cherished for his inimitable fusion of autobiography and irony, and a technical glide that allows his writing to 'slip back to the past as effortlessly as a dreamer' ( The Times).I Knew the Bride is Williams' eleventh collection of poems, and his first since West End Final was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for poetry in 2009. This new volume bears - and lays bare - those qualities that have become so char...

Dear Room is a worthy successor to Billy's Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the 'angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs' of love, separation and loss. With grave good humour, ruefully exact timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. By turns candid, caustic and drastically self-accusing, the...

This book brings together three verse form pieces each of which was created to be part of a broader form. 'Out of the Blue' itself is a powerful, award-winning, poem-film created five years after the attacks which destroyed the twin towers in NewYork. With a title from a speech of Churchill, 'We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing' was a Channel 5 commission for a broadcast celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The third, 'Cambodia', comes from the radio drama The Violenc...

This changes things is Claire Askew’s first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland’s flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet’s privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem’s political message and to th...

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S ELIOT PRIZE AND COSTA POETRY AWARD 2013*'A stone is lobbed in '84,hangs like a star over Orgreave.Welcome to Sheffield. Border-land,our town of miracles...'- 'Scab'From the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships, Helen Mort's stunning debut is marked by distance and division. Named for a street in Sheffield, this is a collection that cherishes...

The fifty poems in Billy's Rain chart the course of a love affair, now ended. Its complications, obsessions, evasions, secret joys and emotional pitfalls are explored with all the subtlety and irony of which Hugo Williams, among contemporary poets, is the acknowledged master. These are brilliant, wry and moving elegies for a love affair.