Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Oli Broom

One man, one bike, two Mongoose cricket bats, one tropical disease, 16,000 miles and a lot of dead kangaroos … 
 
Oli Broom loves cricket. So much so that in 2009 he left his 9 to 5 in London and set off to cycle to Brisbane for the Ashes. Along the way he played cricket in the shadow of the Blue Mosque, slept in a goat pen in Sudan, dodged a 5-metre crocodile in the outback, battled mountains in sub-zero temperatures in Bulgaria and successfully negotiated the treacherous highways of India. 
 
Starring the colourful characters he met on his travels, this is a funny and poignant tale for anyone who’s ever dreamt of jacking in the day job to embark on an incredible adventure.

Cycling to the Ashes

A Cricketing Odyssey From London to Brisbane

Tim Moore

‘Bill Bryson on two wheels’ Independent 
 
Self-confessed loafer Tim Moore, seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, sets out to cycle the Tour de France. All 3,630km of it. 
 
A few weeks before the actual Tour de France, British writer Tim Moore sets out to cycle the course and offers a laugh-out-loud funny and highly entertaining account of how the great ride would feel when embarked on by an amateur. Racing old men on butchers' bikes and being chased by cows, Moore soon resorts to standard race tactics - cheating and drugs - in a hilarious and moving tale of true adventure.

French Revolutions

Cycling the Tour de France

A 3,162 km race. A 48-year-old man. A 100-year-old bike. Made mostly of wood. That he built himself. 
 
Tim Moore sets off to recreate the most appalling bike race of all time. The notorious 1914 Giro d'Italia was an ordeal of 400-kilometre stages, cataclysmic night storms and relentless sabotage - all on a diet of raw eggs and red wine. Of the 81 who rolled out of Milan, only eight made it back. 
 
Committed to total authenticity, Tim acquires the ruined husk of a gearless, wooden-wheeled 1914 road bike with wine corks for brakes, some maps and an alarming period outfit topped off with a pair of blue-lensed welding goggles. 
 
From the Alps to the Adriatic the pair relive the bike race in all its misery and glory, on an adventure that is by turns bold, beautiful and recklessly incompetent.

Gironimo!

Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

'Bill Bryson on two wheels' Independent 
 
Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike. 
 
Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off at the Arctic winter's brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland. 
 
Haunted throughout the journey by the border detritus of watchtowers and rusted razor wire, Moore reflects on the curdling of the Communist dream, and the memories of a Cold War generation reared on the fear of apocalypse - at a time of ratcheting East-West tension. 
 
After three months, 20 countries and a 58-degree jaunt up the centigrade scale, man and bike finally wobble up to a Black Sea beach in Bulgaria, older and wiser, but mainly older.

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