Ian Duhig

Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry… After years of travelling and losing almost everything – his country, his children, his wife, his farm – an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger’s home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.

A Telegraph Poetry Book of the YearA Poetry Book Society Choice'"Accessible complexity" is not an oxymoron in Duhig's work . . . This [is] Duhig's most moving book, full of memorable poetry not just of skill but of heart' – Graeme Richardson, Sunday TimesAn Arbitrary Light Bulb is Ian Duhig’s most personal collection of poems to date. It takes its title from the most common type of household bulb – yet one whose name is virtually unknown, like many people these poems celebrate. Duhig finds in the arbitrary an image for the randomness of inspiration and of life, haunted here by deaths of family and friends. He laments the lost but also responds to the glories of our existence, especially among the overlooked, with humour, technical variety and contagious pleasure. Starting out from ‘contrary Leeds’, his home for half a century, Duhig’s poems roam widely through history, art-forms, loves and injustices, fired by the desire to share it all with his readers: knowledge, joy, anger and wonder.'Multifarious and maverick, deeply personal and political, Duhig’s poetic vision alchemises the heart and mind. This is a brilliant collection from a balladeer of our times, a poet who stands for the people, always with a sense of compassion, humility and wry humour' Jennifer Lee Tsai, Guardian*An Arbitrary Light Bulb was featured in the Telegraph article 'Best poetry books of 2024 so far', dated 09-12-2024

Ian Duhig’s effortlessly fascinating and endlessly quotable verse has had a shaping influence on UK poetry for more than thirty years. This eclectic gathering of Duhig’s best work draws on material from his acclaimed debut, The Bradford Count, to the present day: the book collects a number of fine new pieces, including an elegy for the late Ciaran Carson. Duhig is contemporary poetry’s social historian; he has wise and powerful things to say about the relationship between community and family, racism and justice, place and folklore, music and language. For Duhig fans, the book will offer a mesmerising retrospective of the career one of our most highly regarded poets; for those yet to discover him, New and Selected Poems represents a marvellous introduction to a radical social conscience, an archivist of strange tales, and one of the most skilful writers now at work.

If the starting point for a number of poems in Ian Duhig's richly varied new collection is Sterne's Tristram Shandy, its presiding genius is the great eighteenth-century civil engineer, fiddler and polymath Blind Jack Metcalf - whose life Duhig here celebrates, and from whose example he draws great inspiration. Writing with an almost Burnsian eclecticism, Duhig explores urban poverty, determinism, social justice and the consolations of poetry and music on a journey that takes in everything from a riotous reimagining of Don Juan to the tragedy of Manuel Bravo (the Leeds asylum seeker from Angola who was forced to defend himself in court, and later took his own life). No poet today writes with such a sense of political and social conscience, and The Blind Roadmaker affirms Duhig's belief in poetry as a means of commemorating those who least deserve to be forgotten.

Ian Duhig has long inspired a fervent and devoted following. With The Lammas Hireling - the title poem having already won both the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Poem - Duhig has produced his most accessible and exciting volume to date, and looks set to reach a whole new audience. A poet of lightning wit and great erudition, Duhig is also a master balladeer and storyteller who shows that poetry is still the most powerful way in which our social history - our lives, loves and work - can be celebrated and commemorated.

Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark is structured around his astonishing reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval text that railed against the corruption of the 12th-century French court and church. In Duhig's hands, however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and almost prophetic contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed ambitions and insatiable greeds. Elsewhere Duhig's many admirers will be delighted by his new ballads and elegies, his erudite high jinks and his low gags - with which he builds on the new imaginative territory he staked out in The Lammas Hireling to such universal acclaim. The Speed of Dark again shows Duhig as one the most capacious and brilliant minds in contemporary poetry. 'The most original poet of his generation' Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian 'His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish), art, history, politics and children's word-games' Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday 'Duhig telescopes topical allusions, scholarly references and coarse humour into tightly-shaped, surreal poems which burst open with explosive moral force' Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times

Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Leeds traces the unique contours that fifty years of social and economic change can impress on a city. These are stories that take place at oblique angles to the larger events in the city's history, or against wider currents that have shaped the social and cultural landscape of today's Leeds: a modern city with both problems and promise.