Penned in the Margins acquires ‘witty and exacting’ poetry debut by Holly Hopkins

Blog | Published on December 6, 2021

The English Summer is the first full collection by Manchester-based poet Holly Hopkins and is scheduled for release in June 2022.

Hopkins’ long-awaited debut confronts the illusions and paradoxes of English history in poems that range from medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies to zombies and the Megabus. This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and a ‘pie-faced’ St George is upstaged by the horse.

Director of Penned in the Margins Tom Chivers says, ‘Holly’s poems are clever, witty and exacting creations that probe our collective myths and mores. I was gripped from the first page.’

Hopkins lives in Manchester and is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Poetry London described her 2014 pamphlet Soon Every House Will Have One as ‘ferociously impressive’. Having trained as an archaeologist, her explorations of people and places – of landscapes real and projected, historical and imagined – are both thrilling and timely.

World rights were acquired direct from the author.

Holly Hopkins grew up in Berkshire, grew up even more in London and now lives in Manchester. Her debut pamphlet, Soon Every House Will Have One, won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Holly has been an assistant editor of The Rialto. She has received an Eric Gregory Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and was shortlisted for the inaugural Women Poets' Prize. Her poems featured in Carcanet New Poetries VIII and have been published in The Guardian, The Telegraph and The TLS.

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