Jen Hadfield

''Storm Pegs perfectly captures the knotting of language and landscape. I was transported.'' - Katherine May, Sunday Times bestselling author of WinteringFrom the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Highland Book PrizeWhat if the answer to ‘Where am I?’ is ‘heaven’?In her late twenties, celebrated poet Jen Hadfield moved to the Shetland archipelago to make her life anew. A scattering of islands at the northernmost point of the United Kingdom, frequently cut off from the mainland by storms, Shetland is a place of Vikings and myths, of ancient languages and old customs, of breathtaking landscapes and violent weather. It has long fascinated travellers seeking the edge of the world.On these islands known for their isolation and drama, Hadfield found something more: a place teeming with life, where rare seabirds blow in on Atlantic gales, seals and dolphins visit its beaches, and wild folk festivals carry the residents through long, dark winters. She found a close-knit community, too, of neighbours always willing to lend a boat or build a creel, of women wild-swimming together in the star-spangled winter seas. Over seventeen years, as bright summer nights gave way to storm-lashed winters, she learned new ways to live.In prose as rich and magical as Shetland itself, Hadfield transports us to the islands as a local; introducing us to the remote and beautiful archipelago where she has made her home, and shows us new ways of living at the edge.

Recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry 2024Jen Hadfield is increasingly recognized as one of the singular poetic voices of our time, admired for the sheer vitality of her style and for her devotion to the natural world. Selected Poems offers a welcome retrospective, charting her development from the youthful wanderlust of Almanacs, through the incantatory praise songs of Nigh-No-Place for which she became the youngest ever winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Hadfield’s poetics are rooted in a panpsychist kinship with the non-human – a keen sensitivity to the consciousness that surrounds us, as she coaxes into language the essence of each thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in her rapt dialogue with the Shetland archipelago, translating its wild and abundant beauty, its idiosyncrasies and mythologies. ‘Home’, she writes, ‘is about using poetry to fashion myself a bivouac in the here and now, against the continual losses of the present tense’. Gathering poems from across the poet’s four collections alongside previously unpublished material, Selected Poems is a generous offering from one of our foremost poets of the natural world.