Richard Price

RICHARD PRICE is an award-winning poet whose work witnesses in-between territories and fluid identities with playfulness and yet a moving elegiac quality, too. He is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library and a tutor at the Poetry School.

LATE GIFTS is the new collection with poems which take off in all directions from the 'gift' of a son to the author in late middle age. Here are keen observations of contemporary life from the dual perspectives of child and father, elegies, nursery rhymes, praise poems, and satire. It's a collection bursting with life renewed -- and a global sense of urgency when the 'eco' crisis is as much about economics as ecology. As Maureen N. McLane has writtne: "He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers."

MOON FOR SALE is a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year. These are poems pitting the human scale of a love affair against global crisis, where even the Moon is at risk of auction. It is a book of uncanny dreams: shape-shifting, sensual, and dark.

THE OWNER OF THE SEA is a modern retelling of three Inuit sequences: Sedna the Goddess, who created the sea's creatures; Kiviuq the Hunter who travels and hunts and gradually learns to be an adult; and The Old Woman Who Turned Into a Man. It is a Scotsman Poetry Book of the Year.

Price's award-winning collection SMALL WORLD charts the changing relationship between a father and his daughters. It concludes with a sequence recounting a catastrophe which brings all the lives in the book into perspective.

LUCKY DAY was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa) poetry prize and contains "Hedge Sparrows" the poem which represented the UK in the cultural version of the London 2012 Olympics and was read by Jim Broadbent on BBC radio.

His novel THE ISLAND follows a father and his daughter in a stolen car towards, it appears, the end of the world: "Understated yet devastating, controlled yet unpredictable - The Island is a story of rare qualities that many writers aim for and few achieve. Read it - it'll be one of the most beautiful nightmares you'll ever have." -- Toby Litt.