Pretty

Ahren Warner’s first collection, Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012. His second collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was another Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as is his third collection, Hello. Your promise has been extracted (2017), which was also shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. He is Poetry Editor of Poetry London and Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Loughborough University, and currently lives in London.

Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy.