Search results for ""Author Liz Berry""

Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018); The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021) a collaboration with artist Tom Hicks; and most recently The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Liz's work, described as a sooty soaring hymn to her native West Midlands (Guardian), celebrates the landscape, history and dialect of the region. Liz has received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and Forward Prizes. Her poem Homing', a love poem for the language of the Black Country, is part of the GCSE English syllabus. Liz is a patron of Writing West Midlands and lives in Birmingham with her family.

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*'The Republic of Motherhood' Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem*‘I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhoodand found it a queendom, a wild queendom.’In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns her distinctive voice to the transformative experience of new motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times – when a new life arrives, and everything changes.

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Inspired by a true story, a beautiful novel-in-verse about a child far from home. From award-winning poet Liz Berry.*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS' PRIZE FOR POETRY 2024*'A profound act of witness to a long injustice, and a beautifully crafted conjuring of a life lived as truly as possible' Guardian 'Book of the Day''Ground-breaking' Benjamin Zephaniah'Exquisite' Hannah Lowe, author of The Kids'Home's not a place, you must believe this,but one who names you and means beloved.'In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants.In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has - until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything.Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this spellbinding novel in verse is an exquisite portrait of a girl far from home.'Vivid, compassionate and makes Eliza Showell's voice heard at last' Financial Times *Best Poetry Books of summer 2023*'A haunting, deeply compelling narrative' Andrew McMillan, author of physical'Only Liz Berry could write such raw and staggeringly beautiful poems' Fiona Benson, author of Vertigo & Ghost

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WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2014*PBS Recommendation 2014*‘When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me…’In Black Country, Liz Berry takes flight: to Wrens Nest, Gosty Hill, Tipton-on-Cut; to the places of home. The poems move from the magic of childhood – bostin fittle at Nanny’s, summers before school – into deeper, darker territory: sensual love, enchanted weddings, and the promise of new life. In Berry’s hands, the ordinary is transformed: her characters shift shapes, her eye is unusual, her ear attuned to the sounds of the Black Country, with ‘vowels ferrous as nails, consonants / you could lick the coal from.’ Ablaze with energy and full of the rich dialect of the West Midlands, this is an incandescent debut from a poet of dazzling talent and verve.

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