Midnight in the Kant Hotel

Rod Mengham is the author of several poetry publications, including Unsung (Salt, 2006), Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015), Grimspound & Inhabiting Art (Carcanet, 2018), 2019 the vase in pieces (Oystercatcher) and of translations Speedometry [poems by Andrzej Sosnowski] (Contraband, 2014) and Flatsharing [poems by Anne Portugal] (Equipage, 2021). He was also co-editor and co-translator of the anthology Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (Arc, 2003) and co-editor with John Kinsella of the anthology Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt, 2005).Between 1992 and 2002, he was co-organiser of the annual Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry and since 1992 has been the publisher of Equipage, which has published over 120 pamphlets of contemporary poetry. Rod is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He has published monographs on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and Henry Green; and The Descent of Language (1993); has co-written with Sophie Gilmartin Thomas Hardy's Shorter Fiction (EUP, 2007); has edited essay collections on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, fiction of the 1940s, and Australian poetry. He has also curated many exhibitions of contemporary art since 2003, and has made several films with the artist Marc Atkins (soundingpolefilms) as well as the text + image publication Still Moving (Veer, 2014). He was a recipient of the Cholmondely Award for Poetry in 2020.

'Lucid, percipient essays... Despite its limpid style, Mengham's writing is not always easy - but nor are the ramifications of the works he is engaging with. Most of the essays are only a few pages long, but within a compressed space, he plumbs vertiginous depths of meaning.'James Cahill, Times Literary Supplement