Abigail Parry spent several years as a toymaker before completing a PhD on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish, Serbian and Japanese, and performed or exhibited in Europe, the Caribbean and the US. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), dealt in trickery, gameplay, masks and costume, and was described as ‘a party in a bag’ (Declan Ryan) and ‘vaudevillian sleaze’ (Stephanie Sy-Quia). The book was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, and named a Book of the Year in The New Statesman (Marina Warner), The Telegraph (Tristram Fane Saunders) and the Morning Star (Kate Wakeling). Her second collection, I Think We’re Alone Now, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023, and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the English-language Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year 2024).
Author photograph: Adrian Pope
