January Peaks
I would not live in a flat place
Recording:
connection – poem
About the weirdness of having been in northern Italy just before the pandemic…and other stuff.
Nettles
The Moors
The first major writing prize I ever won was the Betjeman Poetry Prize, in 2018, when I was twelve. My poem was about the moors around Macclesfield. The best thing about the whole experience was when one of the judges, Scottish poet laureate Jackie Kay, in her charming but offhand way compared me to my literary hero Emily Brontë, which led to lots of newspaper articles making the comparison (here). Nothing could have made me happier. I also remember the kindness of the other judge, Zaffar Kunial, whose poetry I love, and the fantastic conversation we had about different poets.
You can hear actor Samuel West reading ‘The Moors’ here , and me reading it on the Betjeman Poetry Prize website
Nettles
The Whale’s Way
This story, which won the Young Walter Scott Prize 2019, was inspired by folk songs from the north-east of England – about the sea, Arctic whaling, and the press-gang. These set me reading nineteenth-century collections of songs, stories and poems in the dialect of Whitby and the North Riding. I was captivated by suggestive and onomatopoeic but now forgotten words and turns of phrase. The words had mostly Norse roots, and I realised that the dialect, like the weather and livelihoods of the people of this coast, had drifted to Whitby by sea from the far north.
What Fiore Saw
This story was inspired by Pontormo’s Annunciation in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence. It was painted 1527-8, during a time of crisis in Italy after the collapse of the lengthy peace engineered by Cosimo de Medici.
The Italian republics, until recently the cultural and financial heart of Europe, were being subdued one by one by foreign powers.