Hot Sauce

Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

In her award-winning debut collection Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape.

Raging with vivid, smoky lyricism and full-blooded imagery, Kaycee Hill’s poems are both a beginning and a continuation. Reflecting on her life and those in it, as well as first-times, underground scenes and the female body, she looks towards what is unflinchingly personal, and also outwards: towards family and strangers, nature and place, and a world that shapeshifts before us.

Hot Sauce is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp.

Kaycee Hill is a poet, creative and professional writing graduate, and digital mixed media artist. Now based in Southampton, she was born in Winchester and grew up in a working-class, mixed-heritage household – British and Caribbean – in Andover. She was selected for Poetry Ambassadors during the height of the pandemic, was a shortlisted poet for the Poetry London Mentoring Scheme 2020, and has been commended for her poetry by The Young Poets Network. She read her poem ‘Scuffing’ in the British Museum’s Refugee Week YouTube event The Poetry of Witness: Writing about Displacement, Migration and Exile in 2021. Kaycee spent the past five years working within the healthcare sector as a domiciliary carer and as a support worker for adults with mild learning difficulties. She believes it is a role wherein you learn everything there is to know about humanity. Kaycee defines herself as an urban voyeur, with much of her urge to write taken from the spry mundanity of inner-city life. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, Hot Sauce, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023.