Bird of Winter - Paperback

by Alice Hiller (Author)

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022
PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021
Alice Hiller's debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected - and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.

Author Biography

Alice Hiller is a writer from London and Dieppe. She is the author of The T-Shirt Book (Ebury Press), and holds a PhD from UCL. Her journalism has been published in the Observer supplement and her reviews in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The TLS, Magma, Literary Imagination and Essays in Criticism. She was the founding Reviews Editor of Harana Poetry and interviews poets in depth about 'saying the difficult thing' on her alicehiller blog. Hiller was a Jerwood Arvon Poetry Mentee for 2017-2018 and shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Poetry Fellowship in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Poetry London, Stand, The Cambridge Literary Review, Magma, tentacular, one hand clapping, perverse and elsewhere. Hiller founded and runs a free poetry workshop aimed at supporting and developing poets working with 'less welcome' materials. She curates the Estate of the émigré sculptor Oscar Nemon, about whom she has also written.