Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus

Selima Hill’s twenty-second collection A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large:

Self-portrait with a Bucket: On being an artist’s model.

The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree.

A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua: Different people’s senses of bafflement with each other.

Baby Peter: A homeless man and his mother.

Agatha: An afternoon in a care home.

Room 17: A 70-year-old woman, baffled but determined.

Men in Shorts and Bonkers: Out walking with dogs and their humans.

Until the Tears Roll Down My Cheeks like Honey: Two strangers in a field.

The Surly Mothers of Successful Men: Short pieces of memoir.

Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe Books are The Hat (2008); Fruitcake (2009); People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014); Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; Splash like Jesus (2017); I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid (2019); and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her 22nd book of poetry, A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.

Selima Hill was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022, made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.