Nigella Lawson has written eleven bestselling cookery books including the classics How to Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess – the book that inspired a whole new generation of bakers. These books, and her TV series, have made her a household name around the world. 
 
www.nigella.com 
@Nigella_Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nan Lawson

Guy Lawson is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist whose articles on war, crime, culture, and law have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, GQ and Harper's.

Guy Lawson

Neal Lawson

Mark Lawson

Mary Lawson's first novel, Crow Lake, was loved by critics and readers all over the world; it was translated into 25 languages and published in 28 countries. It was a New York Times bestseller, won the McKitterick Prize and spent 75 weeks on the bestseller lists in her native Canada. Her second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and selected for the Richard &amp; Judy Book Club. Road Ends, published in 2014, was described by the New York Times as 'tender and surprising . . . a vivid and evocative tale'. A Town Called Solace, published to critical acclaim in February 2021, was an instant bestseller in her native Canada. Mary came to England in the 1960s, and lives in Kingston-upon-Thames. 
 
www.marylawson.ca

Mary Lawson

John Lawson

Jenny Lawson (aka “the Bloggess”) is a #1 New York Times–bestselling author, an activist, and an award-winning humor writer best known for her inspiring candor in sharing her struggle with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. She is the owner and proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a beloved independent bookstore and bar in San Antonio, Texas. She’s been writing her popular, award-winning blog (thebloggess.com) for over fifteen years. She continues to write and speak openly about her struggles while celebrating her often hilarious victories. She currently lives in Texas with her husband, child, dog, and cats.

Jenny Lawson

Graeme Lawson is an archaeologist, musician and historian with a lifelong fascination for music’s fossil record. He has held senior research fellowships at Cambridge and the Freie Universität Berlin, pioneering the application of science to music’s prehistory and tracing musical continuities through time and across continents. 
 
An acknowledged authority in his field, his ability to communicate with the wider public has made him much sought after, both as performer and speaker, and has done much to raise the profile of music archaeology. His writing brings into sharp focus humankind’s profound and enduring relationship with sound and music.

Graeme Lawson

Julie Lawson Timmer grew up in Stratford, Ontario, and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband Dan, their four teenage children and two badly behaved dogs. By day, she works as an in-house legal counsel. By night, she is a writer, mum and stepmum, dreadful cook and fledgling CrossFitter.

Julie Lawson Timmer

Andy Day is one of the best-known stars of preschool television. Andy is the star of multiple children's programmes, most notably his Andy's Adventures, which span from dinosaurs, safari, aquatic, and global, and he is excited to be currently filming brand new adventures, which are going to be dinoriffic! Alongside this he is also the star of 'Andy and the Band' which features Andy's real-life pop band Andy and the Odd Socks, who have played hundreds of live shows, and released over three albums. Andy won a BAFTA for his performance in ‘As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe’. Andy is also the author of the bestselling Dino Dad young fiction series, illustrated by Steven Lenton, and his first picture book, Dylan the Dino Boy Saves Christmas, illustrated by Alex Patrick, will be published in October 2025. Instagram: @andyday81 | X: @AndyDayTV

Andy Day

Andre Hue

Andy Cave

Andy Bull

Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.

Andy Weir

Andy Lane

Andy Watt, a graduate of Warwickshire School of Art has spent the last two decades illustrating columns, articles, and editorial pieces for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent. His work has featured in many other magazines in the U.K and USA. He has illustrated several books, worked on advertising campaigns, and created character designs animated on television. 
 
Andy has an irrational fear of restaurants, but has twice eaten in Jamie Oliver's restaurant ‘Fifteen' in Cornwall which he describes as 'very nice’. Thank you Jamie, please don't take offence at my silly drawing.

Andy Watt

Andy King is a Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. Among his many historical interests are the studies of castles, military culture and Anglo-Scottish relations in the late medieval period.

Andy King

ANDY HALL grew up in the shadow of Denali. He is the former editor and publisher of Alaska magazine. He lives in Chugiak, Alaska.

Andy Hall

Andy Webb worked as a reporter for BBC Television for more than 15 years, appearing daily as a front-of-camera reporter, first on BBC News then as a reporter and presenter on primetime shows including the BBC’sWatchdog, before embarking on a career as an award-winning director of documentary films. It was his journalism over a 15-year period which first revealed the truth behind the infamous BBC Panorama interview with Princess Diana and so exposed the greatest scandal in the history of the BBC. Since breaking the story in 2020, Andy Webb has been invited to write on the story for a range of leading publications, including the Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph, and has also been interviewed many times on television, radio and podcasts both in the UK and overseas. Andy is married, with four children, and lives in West London.

Andy Webb

Ivo Andric was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia of Croat parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians, Moslems and Roman Catholics in Višegrad, the town on the banks of the Drina where his book is set. Until 1941 he served as a Yugoslav diplomat, then, placed under house arrest in Belgrade by the occupying Germans, Andric turned to writing. In 1961 he was awarded the Noble prize for literature. He died in 1975.

Ivo Andric

LJ Andrews is a USA Today bestselling author of fantasy romance. She mystically brings to life worlds of dark Nordic and Viking myths bound by conflicts that bring together impassioned heroes and heroines. In her non-author moments, she is courageously corralling her four children to the myriad of life activities that involves, along with spending time with her favorite hero, her husband. Add two high maintenance dogs and a sassy conure to the mix and that sums it up. She thrives spending time in the Rocky Mountains where she lives in Utah.

LJ Andrews

Andrew Fox

Andre Gide

Andre Sólo is a researcher, and co-founder and editor-in-chief for Highly Sensitive Refuge. He has co-authored a number of scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Psychology Today, The Huffington Post and Quiet Revolution. He has been interviewed by The Telegraph, Vogue and the BBC. Andre is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Andre Sólo

André Gide

Andy Clark is a Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and at Macquarie University, Australia. He is the author of six books including Supersizing the Mind, Natural-Born Cyborgs and Surfing Uncertainty. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, and is an occasional Academic Consultant for Google, UK.

Andy Clark

From the day he was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy's Hospital in London, Andy McNab has led an extraordinary life. 
 
As a teenage delinquent, Andy McNab kicked against society. As a young soldier he waged war against the IRA in the streets and fields of South Armagh. As a member of 22 SAS he was at the centre of covert operations for nine years – on five continents. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, 'will remain in regimental history for ever'. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his military career, McNab was the British Army's most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS. 
 
Since then Andy McNab has become one of the world’s best-selling writers, drawing on his insider knowledge and experience. As well as several non-fiction bestsellers including Bravo Two Zero, the biggest selling British work of military history, he is the author of the best-selling Nick Stone and Tom Buckingham thrillers. He has also written a number of books for children. 
 
Besides his writing work, he lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the USA and UK, works in the film industry advising Hollywood on everything from covert procedure to training civilian actors to act like soldiers. He continues to be a spokesperson and fundraiser for both military and literacy charities.

Andy McNab

Andy Goram

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Andrew McMillan

**WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2019** 
 
‘Vivid, accessible and honest, sometimes uncomfortably so’ Alan Bennett, London Review of Books 
 
In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood. 
 
McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.

playtime

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE* 
 
After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world. 
 
Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'. 
 
McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.

pandemonium

*Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award* 
 
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. 
 
We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory. 
 
Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart. 
 
Winner of the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Physical

Vicki Feaver

Split between dark and light, this book records the dichotomy of human experience with unflinching force and clarity. It deals with break-up, depression, illness and death. But it also reveals an intense involvement with nature and a capacity for healing and love. There are intimate personal poems reflecting on relationships with people and creatures; poems which enter the lives of real and imaginary characters, Keats and Medea and Blodeuwedd, for example; and also poems which engage with paintings and political events. 
 
Set in a territory which connects child with adult, myth with reality, the personal with the universal, the book shows a poet fully open to the richness and possibilities of the world but also aware of its violence and pain, not as a remote observer but as someone who is a part of it.

The Book of Blood

Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove, who died in June 2003, was a friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and became one of the most celebrated and prolific post-war poets - regarded by many as a true visionary. 
 
The Harper, which gathers together his last poems, is a collection still charged with characteristic energy, eroticism and transforming imagination. Redgrove's language thrills with thunder, rain and electricity, the air heavy with perfumes and balsams, wasps and spiders - and reading these poems is uncannily like re-entering a dream. Peter Redgrove made us look at our world with fresh eyes, and he changed our perception forever.

The Harper

Helen Longstreth

Move away, run away, wash up on a strange shore and the room is the same. It will always be the same room... The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Funny, sorrowful and filled with love and life, this beautiful and beguiling memoir goes in search of what we keep behind the doors of the past, how it haunts the present and what it takes to make sense of it all. 
 
Helen Longstreth’s chaotic childhood: the relentless cycle of her father’s alcoholic relapses, the six kids coming and going, the abject apologies and uncertain forgiveness, the meals that bring the family back together again. But while she is studying in America, the land of her parents’ birth, her father dies – and it all comes to an abrupt end. 
 
In the years that follow, she is drawn back to America and another world of chaotic love and alcoholic madness, dying fathers and lost boys. The same problems in a new arrangement. 
 
Ten years after her father’s death, Helen returns to her childhood home to spend a rainy summer with her mother, whose own gift for narrative is a complicated inheritance. Her father’s office, his briefcase, and his desk – all untouched since his death – loom beneath the leaking roof. At last, she begins to open the drawers…

Things in Every Room

Alex Dimitrov

'Ecstasy stands out for its brutal examination of the transience of Eros ... Campy and fun' Guardian 
 
In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. 
 
He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity – even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. 
 
In ‘Today I Love Being Alive’, we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring ‘I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather’; in ‘Poppers’, he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, ‘thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life’, and issuing a warning to himself and us: ‘Poetry / is not a self-help book.’ 
 
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy. 
 
'A rollicking paean to pleasure, an ode to realness and resilience ... Raw and honest and deeply personal' New York Times 
 
'Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god he's here' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 
 
*A most anticipated queer book for Spring 2025 in Electric Literature*

Ecstasy

Adam Thorpe

These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem – ‘From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.’ The collection is concerned with borders and brinks – the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux – and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death. 
 
Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are ‘stations of flame’, and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: ‘The girls I laughed with once/in the baths’ atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still…’

Words From the Wall

Michael Symmons Roberts

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021** 
 
*A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK* 
 
Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world. The poems in Ransom display all the lyrical beauty and metaphysical ambition for which his work is acclaimed, but with a new urgency, a ragged edge to what the Independent described as his 'dazzling elegance'. At the heart of this new book are three powerful sequences - one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude - that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical. The idea of 'ransom' is turned and turned again, poem by poem, seen through the lenses of personal grief and loss, cinematic scenes of kidnap and release, narratives of incarnation and atonement. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.

Ransom

Anne Enright

For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. 
 
Anne Enright has aways been alert to the places where public and private meet, where individual lives are caught by, or alter, the sweep of history. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, and through voices, bodies and time. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. Enright has spent a lifetime reading as well as writing, and she offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. 
 
Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Rory Stewart

From the author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller Politics on the Edge and co-host of The Rest is Politics 
 
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. 
 
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an urgent and inspiring portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria. 
 
These are stories of beauty and ingenuity, which also show us what a better politics might look like.

Middleland

Dispatches from the Borders

Mark Pajak

**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: given or taken away in poems of windows and curtains, torches and blindfolds, and yet here - following in the tradition of Oswald and Heaney - each image is freshly minted through a cool, objective eye. 
 
Every poem seeks to inhabit those seemingly small but pivotal moments which have monumental, sometimes mortal, consequences. For Pajak, time is fluid: a blink can be 'slow as an eclipse', our lifetimes are fleeting, our deaths often lingering and seldom peaceful or painless. 
 
Vivid and visceral, steadily examining violence, sexual encounters, childhood and ageing (a dying grandmother's 'slow pink eyelids, those quick teaspoon breaths'), cars and cities, and Nature - full of wonder and threat - Slide is always asking pertinent questions: illuminating brutality, frailty and tenderness, the responsibility of those who witness - whether voyeur, bystander or reader. This is a charged, beautifully observed and thrilling debut.

Slide

John Burnside

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets 
 
'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
John Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages. 
 
Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability – its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed – and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany – a sudden, spiritual manifestation. 
 
There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a ‘dwelling place’ – a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace. 
 
'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
‘A titan of literature' KATHLEEN JAMIE

The Empire of Forgetting

Fiona Benson

**WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2019** 
**WINNER OF THE ROEHAMPTON PRIZE FOR BEST POETRY COLLECTION 2019** 
 
Violence hangs over this book like an electric storm. Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo &amp; Ghost pitches quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised. These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily – hourly – basis. 
 
The book shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and ambivalent terrain of early motherhood – its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love – reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to raise children in peace and safety. 
 
Vertigo &amp; Ghost is an important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk, and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power. 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 
 
 ‘Misogynistic violence, ancient myth and modern rage confront each other in moving and dynamic verse’ Financial Times

Vertigo & Ghost

Alice Oswald

Winner of the 2017 Griffin Prize 
Winner of the 2016 Costa Poetry Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Award 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize 
 
A Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Herald / New Statesman / Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 
 
Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature. 
 
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also fragmentary, repetitive. These are poems that are written to be read aloud. 
 
Orpheus and Tithonus appear at the beginning and end of this book, alive in an English landscape, stuck in the clockwork of their own speech, and the Hours – goddesses of the seasons and the natural apportioning of Time – are the presiding figures. The persistent conditions are flux and falling, and the lines are in constant motion: approaching, from daring new angles, our experience of being human, and coalescing into poems of simple, stunning beauty.

Falling Awake

James Sheard

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
PBS Autumn Recommendation 
 
The poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’ 
 
These are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing. 
 
James Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.

The Abandoned Settlements

Amelia Loulli

One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now. 
 
*Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025* 
 
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest' ANDREW MCMILLAN 
 
'Original, essential... An unforgettable collection' FIONA BENSON 
 
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world. 
 
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.

Slip

Neil Rollinson

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize 
 
Like Neil Rollinson’s earlier books, Talking Dead is a refreshment of the senses: lifting the lid on the human condition in a heartfelt celebration of the act of being, whether in moments of love or mortality, sex or feasting. 
 
In the central sequence of the book – a meditation on the space between life and death – the dead speak of their final earthly moments with a liberating sense of fascination, and a luminous awe. Elsewhere we enjoy al fresco sex, astronomy via many pints in the Cat and Fiddle, and the deliverance of an Indian monsoon after weeks of thirst and drought. In ‘Christmas in Andalucia’ two lovers Skype each other achingly across hundreds of miles – ‘I am full of loss and longing,’ the poet says, ‘the heart is hewn from elm and oak and mistletoe.’ 
 
As provocative, sensual and subversive as ever, these poems seek and find the numinous in the everyday: some element of ritual or wonder that transforms experience. Although the spectre of darkness is never far away, it is the spirit of pleasure that endures, and we discover to our delight, as D. H. Lawrence did, that the Dionysian finally prevails over the Apollonian.

Talking Dead

Sean Borodale

Human Work was written while cooking. It is the narrative of a voice in domesticity, at the alchemical heart of home – the hearth, or Hestia – where the kitchen is a stage for acts of eating and uttering; for the ebb and flow to the human mouth. The poems were written ‘live’ among pots and pans, beside chopping boards, between plates, bowls, knives, forks, spoons, and servings. Their time is the hybrid time of writing and cooking – where the dimensions of two activities hinge together. The poems occupy a shared space; the work is one work. They live together and cross-talk, like figures in a room, invoking an old story, perhaps one of our very first: how we make food to eat and share, how we draw and transform others’ bodies into being our own flesh and life. Implicit in ingredients are the stories of matter itself: without food there can be no other stories. 
 
Like the poems of Bee Journal these poems started life in notebooks, in situ. Their pages seem marked with the very process of their making: jam, grease, wine stains, crumbs of flour and spice, flecks of meat, fish, fruit, vegetable. Like Bee Journal, this is a book about communal purpose, a record of risk and response – a poetry of the moment, both immemorial and thrillingly modern.

Human Work

A Poet's Cookbook

Jean Sprackland

In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’. 
 
This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. 
 
Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.

Sleeping Keys

Michael Longley

Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. 
 
This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.

Selected Poems

Robert Crawford

One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.

The Scottish Ambassador

Matthew Sweeney

In this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. 
 
Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. 
 
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Sanctuary

A book-length sequence of poems about place, time, illness and recovery 
 
Each of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present. 
 
Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath. 
 
In company with Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Pauline Stainer, Goyle, Chert, Mire employs a tough lyricism and taut line to scrutinise the natural world through historical and personal lenses. Alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still, these poems are a deep examination of landscape, body and mind. 
 
'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' Observer 
 
‘Accessible but worth close reading, she is among the best of her generation’ Herald

Goyle, Chert, Mire

James Lasdun

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. 
 
At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. 
 
Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. 
 
Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

Water Sessions

The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet 
 
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE 
 
In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft. 
 
Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution. 
 
In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic. 
 
‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison 
 
‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson 
 
A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ Guardian

Midden Witch

Maggie Nelson

**AS SEEN ON BBC2's BETWEEN THE COVERS** 
 
A Guardian Book of the Year 
 
Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing 
 
Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. 
 
Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

Bluets

Jean Sprackland is celebrated for her tactile, transformative poetry which makes the miraculous seem familiar and the domestic other-worldly. Her new collection is tuned to new and deeper frequencies. ‘Green noise’ is the mid-frequency component of white noise – what some have called the background noise of the world – and these poems listen for what is audible, and available to be known and understood, and what is not. Each poem is an attempt at location – in time, in place, in language. Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life. Others go in search of fragments of a mythic and often brutal past: the lost haunts of childhood, abandoned villages, scraps of shared history which are only ever partially remembered. A physical relic or a mark on the landscape seems briefly to offer a portal, where a sounding is taken from present to past and back again. 
 
Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.

Green Noise

Ocean Vuong

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
 
‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New Yorker 
 
An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. 
 
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years. 
 
‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.’ Andrew McMillan 
 
 Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year 
PBS Summer Recommendation

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

‘It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802 
 
This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads. 
 
The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

Gigantic Cinema

A Weather Anthology

Ebb and Flo

Meg and Mog

Ink and Iron

Lucy and Tom

Tuck and Tina

Topsy and Tim

Emma and James

And Other Lies

Pizza and Taco

Sarah and Duck

Chaos and Flame

Jack and Millie

The Lost and Found

George and Flora

Charlie and Lola

From the bestselling novel I'm Travelling Alone, two dynamic characters are born. 
Police investigators Holger Munch and Mia Krüger work together to solve the most complex crimes in Oslo, catching serial killers before they strike again but their personal lives are not simple either. As people, they could not be more different but as they battle their own demons their unlikely pairing make Munch and Krüger the best kind of classic detective duo.

Munch and Krüger

Lizzie and Lucky

Anders Knutas

Faith, Hope and Glory

Gods and Warriors

Wizards and Robots

Noughts and Crosses

Malorie Blackman's ground-breaking, award winning series charts the lives and loves of generations as it takes on race and equality with breathtaking drama and heart wrenching sadness. Set in an alternate reality, where the inferior Noughts live as second class citizens in a world run by Crosses, the four books explore the violent politics of a unstable world, and the ordinary lives caught up in in its terror. Beginning with Noughts and Crosses - and the romance of Seph and Callum - and ending with Double Cross, it is a gripping sequence, and an important, relevant story for our time.

Noughts And Crosses

Harry and the Dinosaurs

Key Words with Peter and Jane

The Knight and Her Emperor

Swallows And Amazons

Peter Rabbit Slide-and-Seek

The Snowman flies again . . . In the middle of winter, a little boy's Snowman and Snowdog come to life and take him on a breathtaking and magical adventure.

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