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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>Mort's language is visceral,</b> holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain
Guardian, *Books of the Year*
<b>Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved...</b> Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout
- Kate Kellaway, Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*
<b>A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work</b>
Financial Times, *Books of the Year*
<i>The Illustrated Woman</i><b> celebrates the female body</b>... Her deft poetry<b> mesmerises</b> as it troubles
- Daljit Nagra, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022
The title sequence is a <b>complex, cohesive and at times dazzling</b> analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin
Times Literary Supplement
<i>The Illustrated Woman </i><b>bristles with colour and truth</b>. Helen Mort renders the body in desire, shame, love and pain across landscapes to create <b>a dazzling portrait of our own skin as something that belongs only to us</b>
- Jessica Andrews, author of SALTWATER,
Helen Mort's <b>expert control</b> of the line <b>offers us footpaths through the landscape of the body</b>, showing us all the ways we might mark, redeem, protect or fear for both our own and the bodies of others.
- Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL,
<b>Wildly impressive</b> in its ability to balance its subjects with<b> a questing intelligence without losing a human core</b>
- Rishi Dastidar,
<b>Wide-ranging and insightful.</b>.. These poems are <b>by turns delicate and diamond-hard, </b>with a real<b> flair</b> for a knockout closing line
- Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Autumn 2022 Bulletin
A triumphal collection, that closes with a ritual cleansing and <b>celebration of the naked body, as it should be celebrated</b>... They can be challenging, unsettling poems for a man to read, but that's what makes them such <b>essential reading - these are poems designed to get under your skin, where they belong</b>
- John Glenday, author of THE GOLDEN MEAN,
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*
'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS
'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL
________
The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen Mort
Let me kneel
before the sky and let me be humble, untidy,
let me be decorated.
Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.
The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.
'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLAN