Holly Pester – författare

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionComic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.

'What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.'After a year away, a woman arrives back in her hometown to keep an eye on her wayward mother, Moffa. Living in a precarious sub-let, she is always on edge, anticipating a visit from the landlord or the arrival of the other resident. But her thoughts also drift back to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigations within the house and home become her fascination.The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in Holly Pester's irreverent reckoning with those who house us. This is a story about what it means to live and love within and outside of family structures. It is also a stunning first novel from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

'What it said to me was that I was here again, I was back, back from the great nowhere of somewhere else, returned, all too officially, to the whereabouts of Moffa.'A woman returns to the small English town she grew up in, to live in a new-build sublet flat overlooking her mother's house. Anticipating a visit from the mysterious other resident, she is always on edge, and her thoughts keep returning to the rented room she has just left, now occupied by a new lodger she has never met, but whose imagined navigation within the house become her obsession.The minor dramas of temporary living are prised open and ransacked in this irreverent, experimental and boldly stylish novel which examines a life lived in other people's spaces. A subtly political story about dislocation in contemporary Britain, this is a stunning debut from a writer already hailed as one of the best poets of her generation.

Welcome to Cafés! Somewhere to eat and forget about work, where we can meet friends and not think about love, where we can meet lovers and be too nervous to eat. In Holly Pester’s unique lyric, the café becomes a structure of fantasy and language exploring life at the pressurized edges. It becomes a form – a canto or a verse – unearthing what this space promises us in terms of freedom and thought, and what it holds back. In each iteration, the café remakes itself through the people who pass through it. A worker tries to run a café franchise. A lover sits in the corner, waiting. A woman mourns a friendship while contemplating age and childlessness. An artist tries to launch an art café and hosts an open mic. Both a stylish political intervention and an elegy for communal space, Holly Pester's newest collection reaffirms her as one of the most exciting poets of our time.