The Writers of Wales Database

GROSS, PHILIP

Website: www.philipgross.co.uk
Blog: http://philip-gross.blogs.glam.ac.uk
Email: pgross@glam.ac.uk
Audiovisual footage available here and here

Born in 1952 in Delabole, Cornwall, Philip is the son of an Estonian wartime refugee. He went to school in Plymouth and spent his teenage years walking on Dartmoor. Philip studied English at Sussex University and lived in Bristol during the 1980s-90s, writing poetry, running workshops and later working for Bath Spa University on their Creative Studies programme. He has written poetry for adults and children, novels for young people, plays for radio and stage, short stories and opera libretti. Philip has won an Eric Gregory Award and numerous other prizes, including making the short-list of the Whitbread Prize with his collection The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe, 1998). Philip joined the University of Glamorgan in 2004 as Professor in Creative Writing. One of his latest poetry collections, The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009), won the 2010 T.S Eliot Poetry Prize.

I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon, 2009) won the 2010 Wales Book of the Year. Click here for more information.

Selected Publications:
Poetry
Familiars (Peterloo Poets, 1982)
The Ice Factory (Faber and Faber, 1984)
Cat’s Whiskers (Faber and Faber, 1987)
The Air Mines of Mistila (Bloodaxe, 1988) 
The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber and Faber, 1991)
I.D (Faber and Faber, 1994)
A Cast of Stones (Digging Deeper Press, 1996)
The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe, 1998)
Changes of Address: Poems 1980–98 (Bloodaxe, 2001)
Mappa Mundi (Bloodaxe, 2003)
The Egg of Zero (Bloodaxe, 2006)
The Abstract Garden (The Old Stile Press, 2006)
The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009)
Deep Field (Bloodaxe, 2011)

Novels for Young People
Manifold Manor (Faber and Faber, 1989)
The Song of Gail and Fludd (Faber and Faber, 1991)
The All–Nite Cafe (Faber and Faber, 1993)
Plex (Scholastic, 1994)
The Wind Gate (Scholastic, 1995)
Scratch City (Faber and Faber, 1995)
Close Cut (Thirteen Again) (Scholastic, 1995)
Scree (13 Murder Mysteries) (Scholastic, 1996)
Transformer (Scholastic, 1996)
Psylicon Beach (Scholastic, 1998)
Facetaker (Scholastic, 1999)
Going For Stone (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Marginaliens (Oxford University Press, 2003)
The Lastling (Oxford University Press, 2003)
The Storm Garden (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Poems for Young People
Off Road to Everywhere (Salt Publishing, 2010)

Contributed to:
Pendulum: The Poetry of Dreams (contributor) (Avalanche Books, 2008)
I Spy Pinhole Eye (collaborator) (Cinnamon, 2009)




I Spy Pinhole Eye (collaborator) (Cinnamon, 2009)

A collaboration between Simon Denison's and Philip Gross producing arresting images and poetry of an outstanding quality.

"..Denison presents the dark rootings of steel and concrete in a flashlit night; the feeling of something slamming into the earth, establishing its narrow vocabulary of grass, stone, mould, leaf, strut, and the strange, focused moony chill that freezes everything - moves through the clarity, steadiness and humaneness of Philip Gross’s verbal imagination to create something new. And that, after all, is the idea: the making new, the exploration, or apprehension of the way things are too much and terrible, as O’Hara saw, there always being something else under and beyond the changing names of things…"
George Szirtes

To purchase a copy of this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover

The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009)

A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Môr Hafren, the Severn Sea. A 'dream-like' collection of poetry by Glamorgan University professor Philip Gross has won the £15,000 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.

To purchase a copy of this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover