A Bright Acoustic

Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Delabole, Cornwall. Since winning a Gregory Award in 1981 and ¿rst prize in the National Poetry Competition in 1982 he has published books with Peterloo, Faber and Bloodaxe, including The Air Mines of Mistila, with Sylvia Kantaris (1988: Poetry Book Society Choice), The Wasting Game (1998) and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001). His later books include A Bright Acoustic (2017); Love Songs of Carbon (2015), PBS Recommendation and winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year); Later (2013); Deep Field (2011), a PBS Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; The Egg of Zero (2006); and Mappa Mundi (2003), a PBS Recommendation - all from Bloodaxe. His collaborations include A Fold in the River (Seren, 2015) with artist Valerie Coffin Price, and I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009) with photographer Simon Denison, which won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. His poetry for children includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Scratch City and Off Road To Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011). He has published ten novels for young people, most recently The Storm Garden (2006), and wrote the libretto for The King in the Car Park, a cantata about Richard III, performed by three hundred schoolchildren in Leicester Cathedral. He has taught writing at every step on the educational ladder from nursery to PhD, and relishes collaboration with musicians, dancers and visual artists of all kinds. A Quaker who has also written horror and science fiction, he lives in Penarth in South Wales.