Do poets make good detectives? Find out by following their feats of deduction, in this set of ten wildly varied accounts of mystery and murder. See them soften the tight lips of witnesses, squeeze the hearts of suspects, and wrestle with the muddledness of the inner life exposed. Watch for their subtle skill, but also for the all-too-human weaknesses and maddening contradictions that all honest poetry (and all good detective fiction) holds up, glintingly, to the light.
Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his collection School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As well as writing several shorter poetry books and co-editing a number of collaborative anthologies with Sidekick Books, he has published a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (DeGruyter, 2022). He teaches writing and publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.
Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and voiceover, and one half of the team behind collaborative press Sidekick Books. Her work has been published by Salt and Happenstance, widely anthologised and thrown out of a helicopter. She has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize, judged competitions, and taught courses on folklore in poetry. Kirsten's latest collection, Hot Cockalorum, was published in 2022 by Guillemot Press.
From https://chloestopahunt.net:
Chloe Stopa-Hunt is a poet, occasional critic and disability activist. She was educated at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, editing the 2013 Mays Anthology and winning an Eric Gregory Award in 2014. Now mostly confined to bed, she is rarely able to give public readings, but welcomes continued digital contact where possible.
White Hills (Clinic, 2016) was the LRB Bookshop’s Pamphlet of the Year, and one of the Poetry School’s books of the year. Poems and translations have appeared in journals including Ambit, Magma, Poetry London, Envoi, Poem, Oxford Poetry, and Eborakon.
Online poetry publications include The White Review, Tender, Clinic, Poems In Which, Visual Verse, and Ink Sweat & Tears.
From https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/helena-nelson/:
Helena Nelson is a former teacher in further education and still works occasionally as an Arvon tutor. She founded HappenStance in 2005 as an independent small press, specialising in publishing poetry in pamphlet form. The press publishes often first-time collections by poets from the UK and in 2010 it won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets.
From https://tlth.co.uk/:
Livia is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Our Available Magic (Makina Books, 2019) and a novel, Shelf Life (Doubleday, 2019), and has translated Lorenza Mazzetti, Stevie Smith and James Tiptree Jr., among many others. Livia is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, where she also coordinates The Goldsmiths Prize, and has taught both poetry and fiction internationally.
