Poetry
Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2020
Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. Winner of the Mslexia pamphlet prize for poetry, the collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading.
Alison Binney
Alison Binney is a poet and English teacher from Cambridge. She has taught in state secondary schools for 28 years, and also teaches on the PGCE English course at the University of Cambridge. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens, won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren Books in 2021. Her poems have been widely published, online and in print, in journals such as The North, The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Strix, Spelt, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Gutter, Under the Radar and The Fenland Poetry Journal. Her poems have been Highly Commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, the Bridport Prize and the Rialto Nature and Place Competition. She founded the Cambridge branch of the National Writing Project, which brings together teachers as writers. A keen hillwalker, she has very slowly acquired a taste for the Fens.
Watch Alison reading from Other Women’s Kitchens at the online launch
