Edgelands

Shortlisted for the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and winner of the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Prize - this is a book about the blank spaces on the A-Z: the lost and unloved 'edgelands' between cities and countryside

This book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian

A masterpiece of its kind... Even more uplifting is the chapter on weather - truly one of the most extraordinary passages of prose I have read in some time... This is, quite simply, beautiful, but it is also typical of a beautifully conceived work of exploration, by two emissaries to the wilderness who do the wasteland proud

Marvellously quirky, fascinatingly detailed and beautifully written

The edgelands, where the veneer of civilisation peels away, are the most despised and ignored of landscapes. Ambition turns to dust in the sewage farm and landfill site. But Farley and Roberts's mischievous and elegant forays into these marginal wastes, show that dust turns back to life in them - into riotous ecologies, agitprop architecture and the wonderful business of playing. A provocative, left-field read

Haunting, often inspiring book...Edgelands covers an impressive range of politics, reminiscence, investigation and rumination

Edgelands delights with its sly, impish wit and observation

Eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book  ... overall this is an original, surprising and rather wonderful addition to our literature of place

A book that begs us to use our imaginations; to appreciate what we pass by every day but never really see

This is a delightful and important book.  By focusing on the fringes,  on the shabby reality of suburban life, these poets remind us that there are always new myths for old, that the 'edgelands' may even be our true centre

With chapters on paths, dens, wastelands, business parks and many other topics, this book has opened my eyes to all kinds of things I might not have noticed before

The year's most unusual travel book

[An] eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book

Written in a delectable prose that scatters flashes of poetry over a sardonic undertow of social comment, Edgelands is a lyrical triumph. On Britain’s grotty margins, the duo trace “desire paths” to find beauty and mystery in the rough darkness on the edge of town

Michael Symmons Roberts (Author) Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire. He has published eight collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, and he is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist. He is professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, his Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong was published in 2025. Paul Farley (Author) Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He broadcasts regularly on radio and presents The Echo Chamber on Radio 4. Edgelands, co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the 2011 Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4 Book of the Week.

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. 
 
In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. 
 
Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Paul Farley

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter friends when they are sparking off each other… Farley and Roberts are always entertaining and illuminating, gentle guides and quixotic questers.

Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.

A terrifically entertaining book: thoughtful, funny, informative, with an eye for good quotes and anecdotes, and wide-ranging in both the distance it travels and the material on which it draws.

Deaths of the Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed poet skews the way we interpret their work.

It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died.

The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous company.

Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts make a comic routine out of their own relative longevity… An absorbing, if melancholy trip.

On their pilgrimage, Michael and Paul honour their poetic heroes, but also investigate and interrogate the myth, sending themselves up in the process. The result is a book… that is enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.

The book is a fascinating if slightly ghoulish examination of poets’ deathbeds, and sometimes their last words, such as Philip Larkin’s bleak remark, “I am going to the inevitable”… Deaths of the Poets is highly readable, informative and resonating with a literary hinterland.

It’s an undertaking that explores the often linked ideas of poetry and mortality, but with a questing humour.

A witty and erudite journey into the characters of doomed poets using location as a steer.

From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. 
 
The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? 
 
In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

Paul Farley

Praise for Deaths of the Poets

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter frie ...

Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter frie ...

Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter frie ...

Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.

Books by Paul Farley

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