Flat lay of 12 poetry books against a bright red background

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Reading lists

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

On Mountains and Motherhood

A Line Above the Sky

A gorgeous memoir all about the great outdoors and the impulse to go to our limits

Strong stuff, satisfying and intriguing to read

A candid and moving exploration of early motherhood...the writing is beautifully lyrical

This is a book of the seen and unseen; on being alive; on being wild; on being a woman. This book is about being a woman - both seen and unseen - alive and wild - in a world that needs new words for every single part of this. And my oh my, how Mort writes those new words.

An intimate take on motherhood and self-dissolution, and the way mountains can come to fill the voids of a life.

Guardian Books to Watch 2022 
Evening Standard Books to Watch 2022 
Bookseller Editor's Choice 
Winner of the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 
 
'A wonderful book - exhilarating and taut, fearless in its explorations of wildness, risk, motherhood, and the inner and outer worlds of the writer' Jon McGregor 
 
'This book is beautiful' Emma Jane Unsworth 
 
'Climbing gives you the illusion of being in control, just for a while, the tantalising sense of being able to stay one move ahead of death' 
 
As a child, Helen Mort was drawn to the thrill and risk of climbing, the tension between human and rockface, and the climber's need to be hyperaware of the sensory world - to feel the texture of rock under their fingers, how their crampons bite into the ice, the subtle shifts in weather. But when she becomes a mother for the first time, she finds herself re-examining this most elemental of disciplines, and the way that we view women who put themselves in danger. 
 
Written by one of Britain's most talented young writers, A Line Above the Sky melds memoir and nature writing to create what will surely become a classic of the genre; it asks why humans are compelled to climb and poses other, deeper questions about self, motherhood and freedom. It is a love letter to losing oneself in physicality, whether that in the risk of climbing a granite wall solo, without ropes, or the intensity of bringing a child into the world.

The Illustrated Woman

Mort's language is visceral, holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain

Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved... Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout

A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work

The Illustrated Woman celebrates the female body... Her deft poetry mesmerises as it troubles

The title sequence is a complex, cohesive and at times dazzling analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin

The Illustrated Woman bristles with colour and truth. Helen Mort renders the body in desire, shame, love and pain across landscapes to create a dazzling portrait of our own skin as something that belongs only to us

Helen Mort's expert control of the line offers us footpaths through the landscape of the body, showing us all the ways we might mark, redeem, protect or fear for both our own and the bodies of others.

Wildly impressive in its ability to balance its subjects with a questing intelligence without losing a human core

Wide-ranging and insightful... These poems are by turns delicate and diamond-hard, with a real flair for a knockout closing line

A triumphal collection, that closes with a ritual cleansing and celebration of the naked body, as it should be celebrated... They can be challenging, unsettling poems for a man to read, but that's what makes them such essential reading - these are poems designed to get under your skin, where they belong

Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry: Division Street (2013), winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019) and a short story collection, Exire (2019). Her creative non-fiction includes A Line Above The Sky (2022), winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, and Ethel (2024). She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION* 
 
'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS 
 
'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL 
________ 
 
The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen Mort 
 
Let me kneel 
before the sky and let me be humble, untidy, 
let me be decorated. 
 
Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin. 
 
The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience. 
 
'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLAN

Black Car Burning

The debut novel from the brilliant and award-winning poet Helen Mort

A love letter to [Mort's] home city of Sheffield... Politics and landscape are fiercely intertwined in the history of South Yorkshire, and Mort now demonstrates that she can write as assuredly on both subjects in novel form as in her poetry... Mort, in a beautifully accomplished debut, has blended a rich alloy: a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing

Mort has reined in the poetry to write a gritty northern novel in a lean, unflashy prose, only letting herself go in lyrical interludes spoken by the landscape itself

A book that deals empathetically and movingly with [Sheffield's] ongoing legacy

Black Car Burning does what surprisingly few books even attempt: it gives a voice to the lyric landscapes of South Yorkshire, it looks beyond binary clichés to consider the real lives of real people in streets and suburbs that are often forgotten; Mort handles trauma, lust and loss so tenderly and deftly, it is hard to believe that this is a first novel

This book is a symphony of voices: of lovers and the land they grasp in strong but scar-lined hands. Black Car Burning channels the soul of a city and its surrounds. Helen Mort shifts with deftness and empathy from the sensuous to the dark, communing with slandered neighbourhoods, the shadow of a disaster, and a generation's complex ascents through love. A hymn to a special city and an unforgettable book

Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places

A deeply internalised tale about love and yearning, trauma and loss, and springs from a place where the whispered thoughts of both people and places intersect in unsettling fashion

The debut novel from the brilliant and award-winning poet Helen Mort 
 
Alexa is a police community support officer whose world feels unstable. 
 
Caron, Alexa’s girlfriend, is pushing her away and pushing herself even harder. A climber, she fixates on a brutal route. Leigh, who works at a local gear shop, watches Caron climb and feels complicit. 
 
Meanwhile, an ex-police officer compulsively revisits the April day in 1989 that changed his life forever. Trapped in his memories of the disaster, he tracks the Hillsborough inquests, questioning everything. 
 
As the young women negotiate Sheffield’s violent inheritance, the rock faces of Stanage and their relationships with each other, Mort stunningly grounds these journeys of trust and trauma, fear and falling, in the texture of the urban and natural terrain underfoot. 
 
'A beautifully accomplished debut...a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing' Guardian 
 
‘Helen Mort is unmistakably one of the most brilliant poets of her generation; Black Car Burning shows her to be a remarkable novelist’ Robert Macfarlane

No Map Could Show Them

The brilliant second collection from Next Generation Poet, T.S. Eliot and Costa shortlisted poet, Helen Mort

A highly intelligent, yet very accessible collection and an interesting addition to the ongoing discussion of where our culture is with gender identity… There is something which feels very necessary about this collection and there are moments throughout where it feels like a worthy successor to The Feminine Gospels and The World’s Wife.

Wonderfully playful... In the crowded field of mountain literature, this precise, sparky and constantly surprising book more than holds its own.

A perfect response to the chauvinism face by the earliest female mountaineers… This precise, sparky and constantly surprising book more than holds its own.

Mort’s assurance keeps us on edge, but trustful. One could say she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Her style is spare, showing bone without too much flesh… This is a strong, fierce collection.

An unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale…. Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen Mort’s position as one of the finest young poets at work today.

Mort’s work is firmly in the tradition [of] the greatest modern and contemporary English language poets. She’s channeling Philip Larkin’s shady pathos, and she’s hanging out in Derek Mahon’s forgotten places… Brilliantly laconic, perfectly-timed, sometimes playful…[with and] uncanny attention to detail.

This is a brilliant collection, thrilling in its explorations of our bodies as geological structures, and of our obsessions with mountains, stone and ice. It will come to be seen as an important book about gender and mountaineering, as well as much besides and beyond.

* A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2016* 
 
'When we climb alone 
en cordée feminine, 
we are magicians of the Alps – 
we make the routes we follow 
disappear' 
 
The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves. 
 
Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground – from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2. 
 
Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen Mort’s position as one of the finest young poets at work today.

Division Street

*WINNER OF THE FENTON ALDEBURGH FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE 2014* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2013* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA POETRY AWARD 2013* 
 
The much-anticipated debut collection from award-winning poet and rising star, Helen Mort

Helen Mort is among the brightest stars in the sparkling new constellation of young British poets

Outstanding… There's a confidence and wit that's rare in a first book, but underlying it all is the bedrock of the north of England, its landscapes and stories. These are poems of passion, risk, tenderness and power

Michael Symmons Roberts, winner of the Forward Prize 2013

There’s been a buzz around Helen Mort for a while, and her debut, Division Street, doesn’t disappoint

An excellent first poetry collection -- lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the landscape that inspired it.

Mort is a fast-rising star of British poetry… marked by a gritty urban lyricism and a terrific rhythmic vitality

A poet of exceptional talent, with a strong clear voice, a sure sense of metre and a poetic sensibility which has an unshakeable attachment to the real world.

Although Helen Mort is just 28, it's surprising that Division Street is her first full collection -- so frequently and impressively does her work appear in magazines and competitions... It's a brilliant debut.

A first class first full-length collection

Gritty, witty, stylish and totally memorable. Division Street is a book which has something important to say, addressing a wide range of topics with novelty and intelligence.

The beauty of her debut collection is partly the sense that it has been written against the clock. Every poem is on the move... the style is satisfyingly Orwellian -- no long words where a shorter one would serve. Nor is she a poetic detective assisting with mysteries. She knows when to let be and let go.

An excellent first poetry collection...lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the northern landscapes that inspired it

[Read] Division Street, with its sparky energy and the bracing political awareness of her sequence “Scab”, and you’ll see something of the diversity and ambition that marks our younger poets

Throughout, this poetry has sharp, peripheral vision

*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 specificity: the particularity of names; the reflections the world throws back at us; the precise moment of a realisation. Distinctive and assured, these poems show us how, at the site of conflict, a moment of reconciliation can be born.

Helen Mort

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of loving children. All the difficulties, privileges and rewards of remade families are in this collection; so is extraordinary sorority amid the minefields'

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection, Helen Mort builds a home, and a skin: a shape-shifting, porous house in which the poet, and everyone she loves, might live in the fullest sense of the word’

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

'Euripides said "better a serpent than a stepmother." For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.' 
 
'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital - Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women' SARAH HALL, author of Helm 
 
When a new relationship casts poet Helen Mort in the role of stepmother, she embarks on a personal quest for understanding; moving across verse and personal essay, from fairytale to modern blended family. 
 
Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of female experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, STEPMOTHER radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth. 
 
Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, STEPMOTHER has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take. 
 
'I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently’ CLARE POLLARD, author of THE MODERN FAIRIES

Helen Mort

Praise for STEPMOTHER

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

Books by Helen Mort

Articles featuring Helen Mort

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

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Praise for STEPMOTHER

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of lov ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection, ...

Mort demonstrates commitment to sharing an excruciating truth… Where neat answers falter, messy love persists

Books by Helen Mort

Articles featuring Helen Mort

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an **act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection**, ...