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Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning was her first novel, and A Line Above the Sky is her first work of narrative memoir.<b>A love letter</b> 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 <b>a beautifully accomplished debut</b>, has blended a rich alloy: a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing
- Catherine Taylor, The Guardian
Mort has reined in the poetry to write a <b>gritty northern novel in a lean, unflashy prose</b>, only letting herself go in<b> lyrical interludes</b> spoken by the landscape itself
- Phil Baker, Sunday Times
A book that deals <b>empathetically and movingly</b> with [Sheffield's] ongoing legacy
- Yvette Huddleston, Yorkshire Post
<i>Black Car Burning</i> does what surprisingly few books even attempt: <b>it gives a voice to the lyric landscapes of South Yorkshire</b>, it looks beyond binary clichés to consider the real lives of real people in streets and suburbs that are often forgotten; <b>Mort handles trauma, lust and loss so tenderly and deftly, it is hard to believe that this is a first novel</b>
- Andrew McMillan, author of Physical,
This book is <b>a symphony of voices</b>: of lovers and the land they grasp in strong but scar-lined hands. <i>Black Car Burning</i> channels the soul of a city and its surrounds. Helen Mort shifts with<b> deftness and empathy</b> from the sensuous to the dark, communing with slandered neighbourhoods, the shadow of a disaster, and a generation's complex ascents through love. <b>A hymn to a special city and an unforgettable book</b>
- Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places,
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
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.