Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781911752127
Publication date: July 13, 2026
Price: £10.99
“Elsa and the Wolfman comes at the big subjects sideways and with an irresistible verve of diction and vision.” – Nick Laird
Elsa and the Wolfman is a powerful, lyrical duet between father and newborn daughter, written in two contrasting voices. The father, poet and caregiver, uses classical forms to wrestle with anxieties of raising a child and growing older, while Elsa’s lines – wilful, instinctive, curious – dart across the page countering and shaping him.
Intimate, moving, funny, and sensitive to harm, the collection explores their bond as they navigate a world beset by pandemics, feathered dinosaurs, kidney stones, and stark fairytale nightmares. From waking in a smoky house to the Wolfman letting a bat out of a window, it is a book of love, learning, and the profound, playful bond between father and daughter.
Eoghan Walls
Eoghan Walls is a Northern Irish poet. Born in Derry, educated in Wales and Ireland, he has lived in Germany, Rwanda and now teaches Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has published two previous collections of poetry with Seren Book – The Salt Harvest (2011) and Pigeon Songs (2019) – and two novels with Seven Stories Press – The Gospel of Orla (2023) and Fieldnotes from an Extinction (2026) – and translated the first major volume of Heidegger’s poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006 and has been shortlisted for many other awards, including the Manchester Poetry Prize and the Piggot Poetry Prize. He currently lives with an array of daughters and occasionally goes jogging. Elsa and the Wolfman (2026) is his third collection of poetry.
“This is a collection to be cherished. It is a wonderful blend of fantasy and reality, timeless in its reach, which speaks to us of the playful interactions between a father and his daughter and the bond that is created between them.”
Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
“Eoghan Walls’ Elsa and the Wolfman comes at the big subjects sideways and with an irresistible verve of diction and vision. Here’s birth and death, youth and age, fairy tales and A&E and dinosaurs. These are voluble poems that hum with charm and bubble with real life.”
Nick Laird
“A heartful blend of the personal and the fairytale, revelling in the surreal nature of fatherhood and daughterhood: there are Balder’s buttocks, the refusal of breakfast, playacting, the singing of others into being, as many fluids as you’d ever want. And there is dark matter – in fairy tales things rarely end well for the wolf – turned softly, wilfully to the light. It is all alchemy, a delight.”
Peter Mackay, Scottish Makar
