Books Books
Category: Bestsellers, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854114037
Publication date: October 17, 2005
Price: £10.99
Now with new cover to celebrate 20 years since first publication
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award 2006
“Sheers is a vivid, sensuous writer.” – The Times
“It is the truth in the details that suggests indisputably that Sheers is the real thing, a poet of promise whom we are sure to hear much of in the future.” – Dannie Abse
“Owen Sheers is one of the most exciting talents around and a fabulous performer of his work.” – Carol Ann Duffy
Ideas of separation and divorce are important in Owen Sheers’ follow up to his acclaimed debut collection The Blue Book. The geographical divides of borders, the separation of the dead and the living, the movement from childhood to adulthood, the ending of relationships. Such divides are both moments of ‘mark-making’ and moments of absence. In this collection it is often the awareness of such separation – past or impending – and the juxtaposition of these diverse states – that provides the friction from which the poems are born.
Skirrid Hill revolves around the two poems ‘Y Gaer’ and ‘The Hillfort’, the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape and family, to a more outward looking vision both geographically and historically.
Owen Sheers
Twice-winner of Wales Book of the Year, Owen Sheers’ poetry books include Skirrid Hill, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, and the verse drama Pink Mist, chosen as a Guardian top ten play of the year and winner of the Hay Festival Poetry Medal. His first novel Resistance, was translated into 15 languages and adapted into a film. His most recent novel, I Saw a Man was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger. Owen’s theatrical work includes The Two Worlds of Charlie F., winner of the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, Mametz and The Passion, both for National Theatre of Wales, and Unicorns, almost, about the life of poet Keith Douglas. His arts documentaries include the BBC 4 series A Poet’s Guide to Britain, The Greatest Poem of WWI: David Jones and In Parenthesis and a BBC documentary about the poetry of Dylan Thomas, Dylan Thomas: A Poet’s Guide. His recent BAFTA nominated film-poem about the Aberfan disaster, The Green Hollow, won three BAFTA Cymru awards including for Best Writer.
To Provide All People was his BBC film-poem written to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS. His BBC One climate drama The Trick, was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru best film award and was part of PBS’s Earth Day scheduling for 2022. Owen’s most recent book is a work for children, Drew, Moo and Bunny, Too.
A former NYPL Cullman fellow, Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and Artist in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union, Owen was the recipient of the 2016 St David’s Award for Culture and the 2018 Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. He is Cennad of Wales PEN Cymru, a Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of New College, Oxford, a patron of STAMMA and The Children’s Book Show and a co-founder of Black Mountains College, a new university focused on sustainable futures and systems change. He lives in Talgarth with his two daughters.
