Achilles

Elizabeth Cook was born in Gibraltar in 1956 and educated in England. She lives in east London. Elizabeth Cook is a writer of poetry and short stories, and has also written and presented programmes for radio and television. She is well known for her studies in Renaissance literature, and is the editor of the works of John Keats.

'Elizabeth Cook's Achilles is a remarkable renewal of the tales of the ancient hero... A prose poem with the sensuous commitment of Christopher Logue, it also has something of the intellectuality, and indeed the layered allusiveness, of Thomas Mann'. Michael Silk, Times Literary Supplement 'Cook retells Achilles's story, making the reader feel that it exists in a present tense. She is not interested in polite distance: she gets close to the gods, makes them seem real - a feat in itself. Her writing is charged: every moment matters, each word counts, as if time were running out' The Observer