Tiffany Atkinson

Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. Her fourth collection, Lumen, will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021. It includes work based on a hospital residency that won the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize in 2014.

The publication of her award-winning debut collection  introduced one of the most promising of the crop of younger UK poets. Certainly, like many of her generation, she is commendably various in her concerns, adept at recording the experiences of childhood, family, ageing, love and, of course, the ubiquitous detritus of twenty-first century life. But what sets her apart from the crowd is her unstinting and penetrating gaze, a take-no-prisoners scepticism that somehow never loses its quite particular purpose, and a warm accessibility married with a cool intelligence. Whether writing about difficulties in love or liberty, Tiffany Atkinson is smart, sexy and often very, very funny.

[first published in 2008, updated November 11, 2020] Bibliography

Kink and Particle, Seren, Bridgend (2006)
Catulla et al, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset (2011)
So Many Moving Parts, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset (2014)
Lumen, Bloodaxe Books, Tarset (2021)

Reviews

“A smart, sardonic and vulnerable updating of Catullus…Atkinson’s versions are in the finest tradition of creative adaptation: keeping the originals as ballast, but unafraid to sail off on their own tangents… Other poets translate Catullus; Atkinson creates Catulla, a modern, anxious, sympathetic and merciless persona, caught up in a life she sees through but can’t quite get beyond” – Patrick McGuinness, The Guardian on Catulla et al

“A startling book, full of outstanding poems to be returned to again and again... Atkinson's technique can take poetry, incredibly successfully, to places it is difficult to remember it having been before” – Jonathan Edwards, New Welsh Review on So Many Moving Parts

Links

Tiffany at The Academi
The Academi is the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency, supporting Welsh writers, offering bursaries, running events and competition as well as providing information on exciting poets and writers.

A Writer’s Writer
Article from New Welsh Review, from the archive at poetrymagazines.org.uk.

[updated November 11, 2020]