Collected Poems

Tobias Fleet Hill (30 March 1970 – 26 August 2023) was a British poet, essayist, writer of short stories and novelist. Selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets, shortlisted for the 2004 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and named by the TLS as one of the best young writers in the country, Tobias Hill was one of the leading British writers of his generation. His award-winning collections of poetry are Year of the Dog, Midnight in the City of Clocks, and Zoo. His fiction has been published to acclaim in many countries. AS Byatt has observed that “There is no other voice today quite like this.”Maura Dooley has published several collections of poetry, most recently Life under Water (Bloodaxe, 2008) and has edited anthologies of verse and essays, amongst them The Honey Gatherers: Love Poems (Bloodaxe, 2003) and How Novelists Work (Seren, 2000). She has twice been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Landscape — present, remembered or imagined — has long been central to her work.

Tobias Hill published his first book of poetry in 1995, aged just 25; best-selling novels, a book for children, and short stories followed. London – which in his hands, became a landscape – was his great subject and inspiration: its light and its shadows, its street life and its lonely nights. To their great credit, Hill’s publishers, Salt, have stood by him for two decades, first publishing Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow in 2006, then acquiring the rights to and reproducing his earlier collections, and now producing this collected edition after his death. The leap in quality in the later poems only makes clearer how much we lost when his voice went silent.