Tom Pow

Tom Pow

‘One of Scotland’s finest poets’ (The Scotsman) - and a graduate of St Andrews University - Tom Pow has won three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards for his poetry and Dear Alice (Salt) won the Poetry Category in the 2009 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards , in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council. A one-time writer of travel, radio plays and magazine columns, he has also established himself as a fine writer for children. Who is the World For? (Walker Books) won a Scottish Arts Council Children’s Book Award and the teenage novels, Scabbit Isle and The Pack (both Random House Children’s Books) have been widely praised. An inspiring creative writing tutor, he was for three years Writer in Residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Praise for Tom Pow’s previous books
‘This book is a love poem to the world – a declaration of love to the storied world, the light and the dark world, the gone world. . It has a rare and infectious freshness in its vision, a setting that is always a combination of joy and apprehensiveness… I found Landscapes and Legacies beautiful, grave and moving’
Ali Smith

‘Compelling and beautifully written’
Michael Morpurgo

‘A short classic’
Literary Review

http://www.tompow.co.uk

Dying Villages
By 2030 it is estimated that Europe will have lost one third of its population. It is already an ageing population with a low birthrate. The effect of this demographic change - the greatest since the Black Death - will be felt most acutely in rural areas. In 2007, Tom Pow received a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council for a project aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe.

In 2007 and 2008, he made trips to affected areas in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and Greece. The Dying Village website reflects these trips in sound, image, interviews and artworks.

Dying Villages is an ongoing project. Related works of poetry and prose will appear elsewhere.

Please visit the Dying Villages website at http://www.dyingvillages.com

Books by Tom Pow

In The Becoming; New and Selected Poems

This volume draws on Tom Pow’s work over the last two decades, from Rough Seas (1987) to his recent prize-winning collection Dear Alice (2008). The collection charts his ongoing poetical concerns: an exploration of landscape from the rainforest to the Arctic; an interest in how history and narrative shape our understanding of the present; and, in the new poems, a maturing engagement with those large themes that lie at the heart of Pow’s poetry, namely love and death. In The Becoming offers a timely reading of one of the finest poets of his generation.

Summer 2009, Polygon

Dear Alice : Narratives of Madness

Winner of the Poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2009, in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council.

Tom Pow’s powerful new collection of poetry explores the imaginative legacy of a nineteenth century lunatic asylum, the Crichton, drawing on the richly-documented history of the site. This remarkable book includes the sequence ‘Resistances’ gathered from female patients’ notes, but Pow brings many others within his compass: Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Thumb and Peter Pan all make an appearance, as do Freud and the Wolf Man. The Crichton Lunatic Asylumwas at the forefront of the great nineteenth century European-wide ‘rdae in lunacy’ – a period when old assurances were crumbling and our modern sense of the permeability of identity was being formed.

“These are wonderfully lucid poems, full of humanity...Pow is regarded as one of Scotland’s finest poets – and it shows in this brave collection.”
The Northern Echo

“The elegance and sensitivity makes this sequence [Resistances] the highlight of Dear Alice. When it comes to describing insanity, poetry, it transpires, is a deeply sympathetic medium: the negotiation between words and meanings, the unexpected connections and curious juxtapositions; in life these are marks of madness, but in poetry, they become art.”
The Times Literary Supplement

February 2008
Salt Publishing

CaptivesCaptives
Set on an unnamed Caribbean island, Captives traces the story of two families kidnapped by guerrillas. It shows the tensions between the captives as well as between them and their captors. The focus of the story is the relationship between the two teenage hostages and the young translator – for all three the kidnapping offers an excitement and a richness of experience they have not previously known.

Captives is a novel which deals with a number of large issues – the relationship between the first and third world; small countries’ desire for independence and self-respect; the moral issues of exploitation and armed struggle. But it also tells very personal stories of love, disappointment and loss; of coming of age and of seizing the moment; of what happens when small lives touch on matters of great significance.

World Rights : Random House Children’s Books
UK Publication Date: Summer 2006
US & Canadian Rights: Roaring Brook Press

Tom Pow is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny - .

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