Bøker av Karen McCarthy Woolf

The complex, lyrical, hilarious and completely wonderful debut novel by award-winning poet and campaigner, Karen McCarthy Woolf.An entitled porcelain doll struggles to cope with reality when her lifetime companion, a reclusive billionaire heiress, is admitted to hospital. This is their story.Top Doll is a verse novel and a highly unreliable, semi-fictional biography of the eccentric American billionaire heiress Huguette Clarke, who died in New York's Beth Israel Hospital, age 106, not having been outside for more than 50 years. She trusted no one and spoke to few, except for accountant, her lawyer and her vast collection of dolls, who together narrate this miniature epic. It is both deadly serious and incredibly funny in its exploration of the emotional influence dolls exert on the human psyche and how this embodies family power dynamics and the politics of race, wealth and desire.

The new collection from firebrand poet, essayist and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf, Unsafe is a disenchanted walk on foot through the afterlives and British and American colonialism, weighing the effects of gentrification on those who live at its sharp end.

Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers supported by The Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. In 2008 the level of poets of color published by major presses in the UK was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry - an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo - played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets over a twelve-year period, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes, T.S. Eliot Prize, Ted Hughes Award, Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. As well as poetry, the anthology also includes fierce essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on the most significant topics of our time.This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the 'other' continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times. Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works, with a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.

An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art.

Set against a backdrop of ecological, political and emotional turbulence, Seasonal Disturbances is a charged yet meditative exploration of the relationship between nature, the city and the self in the 21st century