Ella Frears – författare

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2024SKY ARTS AWARD NOMINEE for BREAKTHROUGH ARTIST OF THE YEAR 2024A Guardian BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024''ALL THE HOT WOMEN I KNOW HAVE ELLA FREARS ON THEIR BEDSIDE TABLES'' Sheena Patel''It''s Dostoyevsky''s Notes from Underground reimaged for the renting generation'' Emily Dinsdale, DAZED''A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny'' Holly Williams, Observer ''As compelling as any thriller'' Graeme Richardson, Sunday Times ''I urge you to read Ella Frears'' wild and dark new book'' Eva Wiseman, The Observer ''A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read'' Kate Simpson, Telegraph (5*)I had to wait, input a five-digit code sent to me via text. When it came through it was:00000 which seems insane.I stared at it for more than my allotted minutes. How is it that I found myself with all those holes?A row of ohs. Disgusting.No, I can''t go on. I won''t, Ava. Do you watch porn? Asked by letting agent, Ava, to make an account with the ominous sounding property technology ''Goodlord'', our narrator launches into a breathless and rage fuelled reply that swings wildly between anecdotes of chaotic house-shares, grubby university halls, the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still, her various underpaid exploitative jobs at pubs and restaurants, relationships and sexual encounters both troubling and ecstatic, and an artists'' residency that offers her the space she craves but demands a complicated transaction in return.Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for PoetryUpdated edition, with a new poem and a new essay by Ella, on poetry and process''Fizzing with insistent energy . . . full of crystalline images and metaphors . . . Frears is excellent on sexual politics, the end of girlhood'' Guardian

Ella Frears''s debut is a collection of wry, vivid poems whose power lies in their intimacy. They are as insistent as they are circumspect, drawing close to the reader''s ear and bringing them into confidence. The engine of Shine, Darling is one of strength, of fortitude in confronting and surviving the world, of a lifted-chin audacity - ''There was pain,'' the speaker allows, ''but it was not new pain.''

Frears''s work is world-weathered rather than world-weary, delighted by service stations, fucking on bins in Cornwall, in constant communion with the moon. It lives for the power-play of people, of the pull of the sea, the smoky air - ''Stormy, sticky with flies'' - and tangled underbrush where the land ends. Her characters test each other, experimenting with the boundaries of physical violence, of punishment, of traps, all the while drawing the reader into a complicity that gives these poems all their daring, electrifying muscularity.

In Shine, Darling, the desire to expose and disclose wrestles with defence and defiance. The result is exhilarating, a ''glorious full-bodied'' debut collection with the draw of an adamant tide.