Camille Ralphs – författare

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDThis extraordinary debut heralds the arrival of a major new talent.In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book's three sections - ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee - obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs's style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, tapping into a haunting, era-spanning utterance enlivened by the electric pulse of wordplay and imaginative conceit. This is poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.'Historical figures inspired two distinctive debuts: Elizabeth I's court magician John Dee is ventriloquised with dizzying wordplay in Camille Ralphs's metaphysical After You Were, I Am (Faber, £10.99)' Telegraph, Best Poetry of 2024 'Ralphs's mischievous, metaphysical debut riffs on great religious poets, revisits the victims of the Pendle Witch Trials and explores the life of Elizabethan conjuror John Dee. TFS' Telegraph, 'The 50 Best Books of 2024 - ranked'

Malkin is a vivid evocation of the trials of the Pendle Witches in 1612. The sequence of poems is delivered in the form of epitaphic monologues, with the accused men and women eerily addressing the reader with their confessions and pleas. Strikingly, Camille Ralphs has employed unorthodox spelling throughout the monologues, bringing out new meanings in familiar words and encouraging the reader to immerse themselves in the world of the poems. Fully illustrated with woodcut-style drawings from Emma Wright.