How the Bicycle Shone (Paperback) - Gillian Allnutt

Includes selections from Allnutt's books "Spitting the Pips Out" (1981), "Beginning the Avocado" (1987), "Blackthorn" (1994) and "Nantucket and the Angel" (1997), as well as the whole of "Lintel" (2001), "Sojourner" (2004), and a collection of new poems, "Wolflight" (2007).

Denise Levertov described Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness. "How the Bicycle Shone" includes selections from her books "Spitting the Pips Out" (1981), "Beginning the Avocado" (1987), "Blackthorn" (1994) and "Nantucket and the Angel" (1997), as well as the whole of "Lintel" (2001), "Sojourner" (2004) and a collection of new poems, "Wolflight" (2007).

About the Author

Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. Before that, she read Philosophy and English at Cambridge, and then spent the next 17 years living mostly in London. From 1983 to 1988 she was poetry editor of City Limits magazine. Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections, both from Bloodaxe, are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018). She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988). From 2001 to 2003 she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Newcastle and Leeds Universities. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught creative writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016 in February 2017. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, and was presented to Gillian Allnutt by The Queen.