I wrote this book about ten years ago, partly as a response to the sudden death of my mother-in-law, who’d just turned sixty. Time, then, to get something down. But what? I’d studied Keats closely at university, including the letters and Robert Gittings’ biography and had even written a poem about Keats’ arrival in Naples: to have gone through all that, only to be quarantined for another month. So, after a bit more research, I had my plot and also the ending, which I knew would steer clear of Rome, because Anthony Burgess had written a novel about Keats dying there already. Over a period of two years, in cafes and classrooms [empty ones], I gradually put together a series of scenes describing the journey to Italy. I chose third-person focalised narrative because that offered me both descriptive luxuries and the ability to explore voice/point of view. The hardest part was settling on dialogue that didn’t sound like botched Beau Brummell, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible, in contrast to some lusciousness over river-bank and ocean-wave. In particular, I found I enjoyed writing about the Thames [five years’ hard labour in Grays, Essex helped] and about…
Red Hand Books are please to announce it has entered Jack Alun’s stunning new poetry collection for the Forward Arts Foundation Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. This prize is sponsored by the Estate of Felix Dennis and offers the winner a prize of £5,000.