Caroline Bird – författare

Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes AwardShortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird’s fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, ‘revving on a wish’.

Until recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention: everything from the location to the outfits to the language of the ceremony was decided by our particular cultures, religions and social expectations of gender and domestic roles; and of course, many of us were unable to get married at all. Now gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; we can get hitched in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster.But the old traditions die hard, and despite these apparent new freedoms, the word ‘wedding’ still retains so many connotations, controlling our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the ‘wedding poem’, even a Star Trek themed do, with guests in bumpy skull-caps, can still translate the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.This anthology aims to shake that up, featuring poems you won’t find on any ‘lists’ in your frantic Google search. Alternative poems for alternative weddings, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shot-gun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a forty-year love. If you’re looking for a non-cringey wedding poem, or want to be reminded of the multiplicity of love, this is the book for you.

Until recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention: everything from the location to the outfits to the language of the ceremony was decided by our particular cultures, religions and social expectations of gender and domestic roles; and of course, many of us were unable to get married at all. Now gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; we can get hitched in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster.But the old traditions die hard, and despite these apparent new freedoms, the word ‘wedding’ still retains so many connotations, controlling our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the ‘wedding poem’, even a Star Trek themed do, with guests in bumpy skull-caps, can still translate the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.This anthology aims to shake that up, featuring poems you won’t find on any ‘lists’ in your frantic Google search. Alternative poems for alternative weddings, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shot-gun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a forty-year love. If you’re looking for a non-cringey wedding poem, or want to be reminded of the multiplicity of love, this is the book for you.

Based on ten years of surveys and excavations in Nyiyaparli country in the eastern Chichester Ranges, north-west Australia, Crafting Country provides a unique synthesis of Holocene archaeology in the Pilbara region.

In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong?

Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Clytemnestra must try to stop him, Iphigenia must accept her fate, the Chorus must watch.Ships lie dormant in harbours, and thousands of troops sit on the shore, growing restless and unruly. Helen is gone, and pursuit of her has been stalled by windless seas. To raise the winds to send his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon is commanded by the gods to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. But his deceit of his wife, Clytemnestra and the killing of his child, will end up tearing him and everything around him to pieces.Euripides’ story of a father moved to murder his daughter, Iphigenia at Aulis, is one that has been reinvented and retold anew throughout history. The Iphigenia Quartet sees four of the UK’s most exciting and radical playwrights - Caroline Bird, Suhayla El Bushra, Lulu Raczka, and Chris Thorpe – create explosive responses to this classical tragedy. Each play is a reimagining this story of familial catastrophe from the differing perspectives of the key characters in the play: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and the Chorus.

Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Clytemnestra must try to stop him, Iphigenia must accept her fate, the Chorus must watch.Ships lie dormant in harbours, and thousands of troops sit on the shore, growing restless and unruly. Helen is gone, and pursuit of her has been stalled by windless seas. To raise the winds to send his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon is commanded by the gods to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. But his deceit of his wife, Clytemnestra and the killing of his child, will end up tearing him and everything around him to pieces.Euripides’ story of a father moved to murder his daughter, Iphigenia at Aulis, is one that has been reinvented and retold anew throughout history. The Iphigenia Quartet sees four of the UK’s most exciting and radical playwrights - Caroline Bird, Suhayla El Bushra, Lulu Raczka, and Chris Thorpe – create explosive responses to this classical tragedy. Each play is a reimagining this story of familial catastrophe from the differing perspectives of the key characters in the play: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and the Chorus.

In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong?

An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches, where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a mouse can blow your head off.In just one day, this little girl revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour. Her name is DOROTHY.

An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches, where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a mouse can blow your head off.In just one day, this little girl revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour. Her name is DOROTHY.

Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021. Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection.Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020).A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023. Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader.Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review.Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices.

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024A Financial Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park.Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.''Vegetable crisps.The words yawn like a black hole,sucking my eyes backwardsinto my head until I seemy own brain glowinglike a radioactive cauliflower.'

'A working-class woman inside the walls of Westminster? If that is not espionage, I do not know what is.'Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world.Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction.And yet – despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers – she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in.Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022.

'And what happens when the pendulum swings too far? We push back.'In the 1970s, one enigmatic old lady wielded extraordinary influence, fighting against what she believed was the UK's moral decline. Armed with only a typewriter, this seemingly harmless grandmother took on the BBC and the 'godless media' in a culture war that divided the nation.Inspired by real events, Caroline Bird's wickedly funny play delves into Whitehouse's most explosive battle – her infamous blasphemy trial against Gay News – and explores her formidable resolve to push back the tide. Was she a pearl-clutching prude or 'the most dangerous woman in Britain'?A fascinating investigation into freedom and censorship, The Last Stand of Mrs. Mary Whitehouse was co-commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse, Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Pakenham Projects. Premiering at Nottingham Playhouse in 2025, it was directed by Sarah Frankcom and starred Maxine Peake and Samuel Barnett.

Caroline Bird’s two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the Hudson Review. Watering Can celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, Watering Can has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation.