Siân Hughes – författare

Winner Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for PoetryShortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2009Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised – ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives – raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside. Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame. When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her.Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart, No Such Thing as Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.