Steve Ely – författare

Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Oswald, King of Northumbria from 635 to 642 AD, was a warrior, evangelist, hunter, scholar, martyr and, most famously of all, main rival to George's claim to be patron saint of England. Oswald's Book of Hours is a series of elegies and eulogies for Oswald, written in the voices of an unlikely band of northern radicals, including union leader Arthur Scargill, hermit Richard Rolle, brigand John Nevison, Catholic rebel Robert Aske – and Oswald himself.Brutal, provocative and thrillingly original, Oswald's Book of Hours is a pocket history of northern subversion and exile, going back before the Industrial Revolution, before the Reformation, before England even existed.Steve Ely lives in the West Riding of Yorkshire. A former Sunday League footballer and secondary school headteacher, his other works include the novel Ratmen, published by Blackheath Books in June 2012. A selection of poems from Oswald's Book of Hours will appear in a forthcoming Five Leaves anthology of Yorkshire poetry.

After the battle of Brunanburh, when Æthelstan's army defeated an invading alliance of Scots, Irish, Britons and Norse, the Viking mercenary Egil Skallagrimsson extemporised a panegyric for the English and their king.

Englaland is a stunning re-imagining of Skallagrimsson's song, an unapologetic and paradoxical affirmation of a bloody, bloody-minded and bloody brilliant people. Danish huscarls, Falklands war heroes, pit-village bird-nesters, aging prize-fighters, flying pickets, jihadi suicide-bombers and singing yellowhammers parade through the book in an incendiary combination, rising to the challenge of the skald's affirmation: you are the people in the land; know you are the people; know it is your land.

Steve Ely lives in the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His first collection, Oswald's Book of Hours, was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013 and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2014.

The poems in this anthology emerged from a creative writing short course devised by Steve Ely, entitled 'Writing the Apocalyptic Landscape' – the first in a planned series under the rubric of 'The Expressionist Poetry Workshop'. Participants were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them.

The course and anthology are also part of a wider AHRC-funded research project, entitled Ted Hughes's Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity, which explores the contention that Hughes's most distinctive and original work is essentially Expressionist, and seeks to encourage innovative and experimental poetry informed by Expressionist principles.