Product details
- ISBN 9780571231881
- Weight: 97g
- Dimensions: 127 x 200mm
- Publication Date: 24 May 2018
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Unicorns, Almost portrays the short life of World War II poet Keith Douglas, from his childhood through four engagements to his fighting in the Western desert, his accelerated education as a poet and his early death three days after the Normandy D-Day landings at the age of twenty-four. It is the story of his Faustian pact with a war that would nurture his unique poetic voice before taking it away. It is also the story of his desperate race to see his poems in print.
Widely recognised as the finest poet of World War Two, Keith Douglas was championed by Ted Hughes as an important influence. Hughes wrote the introduction to Douglas's Collected Poems, published by Faber.
Unicorns, Almost by Owen Sheers opened at The Swan Hotel, Hay-on-Wye, in May 2018.
Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales.
The winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 1999 Vogue Young Writer's Award, his first collection of poetry, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000) was short-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year and the Forward Prize Best First Collection 2001. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber, 2004), a non-fiction narrative set in Zimbabwe, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Twenty Next Generation Poets'. Owen's second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005) won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and is a WJEC and AQA A level set text. Unicorns, almost his one man play based on the life and poetry of the WWII poet Keith Douglas was developed by Old Vic, New Voices.
Owen's first novel, Resistance, has been translated into eight languages. His recent collaboration with composer Rachel Portman, The Water Diviner's Tale, an oratorio for children, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms 2007. His essay Bomb Gone, about Britain's Christmas Island thermonuclear tests, appears in Granta 101. Owen is currently a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
