Kiran Millwood Hargrave was born in London in 1990. Her poetry and short stories have been selected to feature in publications such as The New Writer, Aviary, The Forest Book of Bedtime Stories and Orbis. You can view her website here.

The British Shakespeare Association commissioned her first pamphlet, Scavengers. This was an ekphrastic project with Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence, Tom de Freston. Scavengers was launched at the Cambridge Shakespeare Conference in September 2011.

Last March is her first full collection, and was produced in collaboration with the Scott Polar Research Institute to mark the centenary of Captain Scott’s final expedition to the South Pole. It is launching March 8th at the Phoenix Artist Club on Charing Cross Road, London, together with Sarah Salway’s first collection, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book. The evening will begin at 7 pm and we will be hearing from poets Catherine Smith and Sue Guiney too! All are welcome.

Praise for Scavengers

‘vivid and evocative work’ – Dr. Abigail Rokison, Director of the Cambridge Shakespeare Conference

‘powerful, disquieting and contemporary’ – John Mole, Poetry Society’s Poet in Residence to the City of London

‘a poet who daringly free-associates…Kiran’s language is immediate and totally contemporary, more Beckett than Shakespeare in its tense spare economy, but revealing a wit and clarity without which this project could not have been achieved’ – Sir Trevor Nunn

The title poem from forthcoming collection Last March

Last March

Still,

Imagine that this is the point where they made camp;
This smear of dark tent in this unflinching brightness,
That this is where their last March took them
The months pulling them on, drawn against the white
Like pencil marks on paper, stories stuffed into their boots
And heads, for they could take nothing else on their tired legs,
On this, the last stretch before home.

They did not drop like flies but rather faded, rubbed out
By the icy lovelessness of a snowstorm,
Quieter and slower than we would like to think,
Like the suffocation of a candle, or the opening of a daffodil.
At home it is spring,
But on their last march Scott met his final winter
Not knowing the weight of the pen, the depth of his mark as he wrote

The last hurried thought –
“For God’s sake look after our people” –
Or how, two years on a war would start,
And after four more they’d consider it won
Yet the people unlooked for, God’s sake sought in the sound of bombs
And shells, and Scott, dying snail-paced to the sound of snow
And silence, and breaths guttering out, slower, now, slow.