Ross Sutherland – författare

Featured on BBC's Newsnight Review.Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland's intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry.Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an 'Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love'. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where 'all the roads that lead out are really leading back in'."In his free-wheeling lyricism, caustic wit and brilliantly surreal turn of image, Sutherland is a truly contemporary original. His poetry rejuvenates techniques as disparate as collage, memoir, sound experiment and formal appropriation in vigorous but finely wrought lines. Refreshingly fearless and bleakly funny, Things To Do Before You Leave Town collects works that shock and delight in performance but reveal their true depth on the page."Luke Kennard"Ross Sutherland's poetry approaches the epic; a kind of epic on a human scale. If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3Ross Sutherland was born Edinburgh in 1979. A former lecturer in electronic literature at Liverpool John Moore's University, Ross now works as a freelance journalist and as a tutor in creative writing. He was one of The Times' Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. Ross's poems have been published in Rising, Reactions, Orbis, Mercy, Tears in the Fence, The Fix and NME. He co-edited the new writing anthology Rock/text (Pen & Inc, 2002). A founding member of Aisle16, Ross has co-written eight live literature productions, including the critically acclaimed Poetry Boyband and Found in Translation. Ross makes regular appearances at Manchester Literature Festival, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Glastonbury, Latitude Festival, Port Eliot Literary Festival and venues around the UK.

In his ambitious second full collection, Ross Sutherland is an uneasy observer of our age of inauthenticity, hacked computers and digital avatars. Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature.Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world."If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3"Sparky, surprising, joyous poetry" Roddy LumsdenRoss Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009, followed by the limited-edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the free National Poetry Day e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross regularly appears at the Aldeburgh, Manchester, Glastonbury and Latitude Festivals; he is taking his latest show, Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, to the Edinburgh Fringe 2012. He lives in Cambridge.