Martina Evans – författare

This title tells the story of Beulah Kingston, who in her late sixties is still almost as tall and headstrong as on her wedding day in 1944. Born a Poleite, her zest for life has tested her simple faith to the limit. Now, with the prospect of hospital, she examines the true passion of her youth.

Martina Evans's fifth collection moves from the impact of American culture and rock'n'roll in the 1960s on her home town, a small Catholic community in rural Ireland, to life in contemporary London. Her poems spring from memories, anecdotes of local characters, children's books, shoes and cats; finally they revisit her Burnfort schooldays in sharp, truthful and often funny poems. Her poems will appeal to all who enjoy her unique blend of poetry and storytelling, her astute mimicry of conversational styles and her gift for offbeat humour.

Tells the story of Beulah Kingston, who in her late sixties is still almost as tall and headstrong as on her wedding day in 1944. Born a Poleite, her zest for life has tested her simple faith to the limit. Now, with the prospect of hospital, she examines the true passion of her youth.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse.Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.

Winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022. A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021. A Sunday Independent (Ireland) Book of the Year 2021. Martina Evans's eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore.As happens often in her poems, new and invented experiences throw into relief Evans's own intensely lived experiences: the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes. And we revisit places her readers have encountered before, especially Burnfort, County Cork, with its bars and gossip and childhood complications, a subject of her lyrics.And, in the wake of the success of her 2018 book-length sequence, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, she gives us a new long poem, 'Mountainy Men', which re-imagines family trauma through the prism of classic American cinema... American Mules is two books and two or more worlds in one. Evans's English makes different musics in the imagining of Ireland, England and America, but the same wise, wry, inventive mouth speaks them all.

Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2024A TLS and The Irish Times Book of the YearThe Coming Thing isa brilliant long narrative poem. It is not Evans's first: she has become celebrated for work on this scale, spoken, dramatic, abundant. She has been justly acclaimed by, among others, Colm Toibin. He says of her inimitable narrative style, 'Slowly, a poem that seems animated by random thoughts and images takes on a strange, concentrated power; the lines begin to feel like pure style, the narrative voice holding and wielding the hidden energies that Martina Evans consolidates, and then releases with such energy and confidence and verve.'Imelda, the book's central character, is immersed in challenging new worlds where old customs still somehow survive. It is the 1980s and the poem takes shape among punks in Cork City. The 'coming thing' refers to the arrivalof computers which were taking hold and beginning to effect their transformations of data and then of lives; but ultimately the title identifies the abortion which Imelda will have in a Brixton clinic.Imelda, who Evans's regular readers will recall from her earlier narrative Petrol (2012),narrates the story with a light touch, even when the book's preoccupation with abortion, suicide and euthanasia provides a strong and compelling undertow. The Coming Thing looks hard at the duplicity surrounding received ideas about the sacredness of human life and how economic change runs counter to the values of 'old' Ireland.

The Poetry Book Society Summer Choice 2026Drunken Driving is the funny and subversive sequel to Martina Evans’s narrative poem The Coming Thing, set ten years on. Imelda, now a young mother, is married to Carl. When she gets a job in the X-ray Department at Pentonville Prison and learns to drive, her previous preoccupations with life and death and abuse of power are intensified within the prison walls.The sonnets are ‘cuffed’ by quotes from Dracula and prison security rules, providing ironic commentary on the main narrative exploring issues of control. This timely collection delivers dark comedy as it raises serious questions about human society during the present international prison crisis, with the UK prison system on the verge of collapse.