Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017

About Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was a poet novelist short story and childrens writer. Her poetry books received a Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and the Signal Poetry Award. Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997. Inside the Wave won the 2017 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year. She won rst prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 1990 with her poem Sisters leaving the dance and first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010 with The Malarkey. After making her debut with The Apple Fall in 1983 she published all her poetry with Bloodaxe. Her earlier work was collected in Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001) which was followed by Glad of These Times (2007) The Malarkey (2012) and Inside the Wave (2017) her tenth and final collection. A new retrospective Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. She published twelve novels and three books of short stories with Penguin including A Spell of Winter (1995) winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction Talking to the Dead (1996) The Siege (2001) Mourning Ruby (2003) House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010) as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer and The Lie (2014) Exposure (2016) and Birdcage Walk (2017) with Hutchinson. A posthumous story collection Girl Balancing and Other Stories followed from Hutchinson in 2018. Born in Beverley Yorkshire she studied English at York University and after graduating in 1973 spent two years teaching in Finland before settling in Bristol.