Shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2006

Tim Liardet’s masterly collection, The Blood Choir, will surprise readers with its dramatic subject matter: teaching poetry in prison. An acutely observed incident is recalled and given a multitude of perspectives, each perspective resounding with an emotional corollary – sometimes fear, often sympathy. The vision is dark, but not without humour. There is a playful inventiveness and an adroit irony, often at the author’s expense. As well as the work inspired by the prison there are digressions: several pieces stem from the foot and mouth outbreak.

Tim Liardet was born in London. He is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University. He has produced four collections of poetry with Seren. His third collection, Competing with the Piano Tuner, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998, and his fourth, To the God of Rain, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. The prison poems contained in The Blood Choir won the Smith Doorstop Competition and received an Arts Council England Writers’ Award, both in 2003.