Short Biography
Jacob Polley is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink, Little Gods and, most recently, The Havocs, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town. Born in Cumbria, he lives in Scotland where he teaches at the University of St Andrews.
Extended Biography
Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria.He is the author of three acclaimed books of poems, The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) and The Havocs (2012), all published by Picador, UK. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
In 2011, he was Arts Queensland’s poet-in-residence, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7. He has also held residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and at the Wordsworth Trust.
In 2004, he was named one of the ‘Next Generation’ of the twenty best new poets in Britain. His first novel, Talk of the Town, a fiercely demotic and funny coming-of-age murder mystery, won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. He teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Fife, Scotland.
Press Reviews
On The Havocs (2012)
‘Jacob Polley’s third collection shows him widening and deepening his skill for adding new shine to work in the collective word-hoard. ‘The News’ has the unmistakable authority of Auden: ‘The moon’s not sad; the sun won’t worry. / Despite your suffering, England’s still / and only some of us are sorry.’’
The Telegraph
On Talk of the Town (2009)
‘A fierce cry of talent, raw as a confession and tender as a poem. Polley’s language is mercurial, his humour quick and surprising. A moving and unmissable debut.’
Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand
‘a perfectly pitched quest for lost innocence’
John Burnside in the Guardian
‘Polley unflinchingly patrols the moral borders at which vulnerable young minds might be tipped into violence, as Chris finds himself almost literally on a knife’s edge and must learn what it is to feel pain. Talk of the Town is about youngsters testing emotional, geographical and temporal limits, dramatically involved in events which unfold in the eerie space between days. Polley’s beguiling prose style tests the limits of language, blending lyricism with brutality; juxtaposing tenderness with vicious criminality.’
Independent
On Little Gods (2006)
‘Polley’s short narratives grow more nightmarish, and the element of reticence and mystery in the earlier volume deepens in ambiguous love poems.’
Alan Brownjohn in The Times
‘[The Brink’s] short, tough, well-wrought poems, with their satisfying-in-the-mouth vowels, seemed as indebted to song lyrics as to British poetry after Auden…readers interested in the shiftiness and complexity which characterise most human experience will find much to reward them here… Little Gods is a book of darting apperceptions, fragmentary illuminations, often daringly unanchored by any conventional working-through.’
Fiona Sampson in the Liberal
On The Brink (2003)
‘A sparkling collection of crystalline poems, succinct in their observation, precise in their form.’
The Times
‘His writing aspires to the tradition of George Herbert or Henry Vaughan, the kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent.’
The Guardian
Images
Images c/o Sandi Friend – www.sandifriend.co.uk
