Search results for ""author robin robertson""

Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020 ‘I’ve long admired Robin Robertson’s narrative gift . . . If you love stories, you will love this book.’ Val McDermidThe new book from the author of The Long Take, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of both the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.Like some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition, Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer – a man, beast or god.A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits. Here, Robin Robertson and his brother Tim Robertson – whose accompanying images are as unforgettable as cave-paintings – raise strange new forms which speak not only of the potency of our myths and superstitions, but how they were used to balance and explain the world and its predicaments.From one of our most powerful lyric poets, this is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, characters on the cusp of their transformation – whether women seeking revenge or saving their broken children, or men trying to save themselves. Haunting and elemental, Grimoire is full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.

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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2018Winner of The Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction'A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring.' --John Banville, GuardianA noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties. While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.Robin Robertson's The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.

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Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020From the author of The Long Take, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of both the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.‘I’ve long admired Robin Robertson’s narrative gift . . . If you love stories, you will love this book.’ Val McDermidLike some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition, Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer – a man, beast or god.A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits. Here, Robin Robertson and his brother Tim Robertson – whose accompanying images are as unforgettable as cave-paintings – raise strange new forms which speak not only of the potency of our myths and superstitions, but how they were used to balance and explain the world and its predicaments.From one of our most powerful lyric poets, this is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, characters on the cusp of their transformation – whether women seeking revenge or saving their broken children, or men trying to save themselves. Haunting and elemental, Grimoire is full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.

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This stunning translation, by the acclaimed poet Robin Robertson (Forward Prize, Man Booker shortlist 2018), has reinvigorated Euripides' devastating take of a god's revenge for contemporary readers, bringing the ancient verse to fervid, brutal life.Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, has come to Thebes, and the women are streaming out of the city to worship him on the mountain, drinking and dancing in wild frenzy. The king, Pentheus, denouces this so-called 'god' as a charlatan. But no mortal can deny a god and no man can ever stand against Dionysus.'The dialogue is taut, volcanic and often exquisitely beautiful... Euripides deserves to have his exquisite verse transformed into modern speech, and in Robertson I believe he has found a poet who can do that.' Edith Hall, Literary Review

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Robin Robertson's fourth collection is, if anything, an even more intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book than Swithering, winner of the Forward Prize. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary: the poet's gaze -- whether on the natural world or the details of his own life -- is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry and disarming humour. Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic (and at times horrific) retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems in The Wrecking Light pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human. Ghosts sift through these poems -- certainties become volatile, the simplest situations thicken with strangeness and threat -- all of them haunted by the pressure and presence of the primitive world against our own, and the kind of dream-like intensity of description that has become Robertson's trademark. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep which confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today. 'Robin Robertson continues to explore the bleak, beautiful territory that he has made his own. His stripped-bare lyricism, haunted by echoes of folksong, is as unforgiving as the weather and poems such as 'At Roane Head' show him writing at the height of his considerable powers' The Times

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WINNER OF THE 2006 FORWARD PRIZE In Scots, the verb 'swither' has two meanings: to be doubtful, to waver, to be in two minds; and to appear in shifting forms - indeterminate and volatile. From disarmingly direct poems about the end of childhood to erotically charged lyrics about the ends of desire, Robertson's powerful third collection is stalked and haunted by both senses. Hard-edged, pitch-perfect, effortlessly various, Swithering is a book of brave and black romance, locating its voice in that space where great change is an ever-present possibility. Swithering has just won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and is also shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize.

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THE ACCLAIMED TRANSLATION BY ROBIN ROBERTSON (FORWARD PRIZE, MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST 2018)Euripides' Medea, the brutally powerful ancient Greek tragedy that reverberates down the centuries, has been brought to fresh and urgent life by one of our best modern poets.Medea has been betrayed. Her husband Jason has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible...Suitable for the general reader as well as for students and performers.'In Robertson's lucid, free-running verse, Medea's power is released into the world, fresh and appalling, in words that seem spoken for the first time' Anne Enright'This version of Medea is vivid, strong, readable and brings triumphantly into modern focus the tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks' John Banville'Robertson's achievement is to make the dialogue flow without losing the unsettling poetry of the original' Financial Times

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