Helen Mort (Sheffield)
The Artist
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. She has published two pamphlets of poetry with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2010. Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008.
In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She has performed her work everywhere from Latitude festival to Buckingham Palace and in 2010 took her live literature show to the Edinburgh Fringe. Helen has also written drama for radio and for stage.
The Citybook
God of the Gaps is a dream-sequence, a journey through Sheffield at night, part memory, part fantasy. It extends Helen´s interest in the supernatural and the pub as a theatre where strange things take place. The narrator navigates her way through a city where all names, signs and other markers of place have been removed, and uses writing as a kind of compass, a way of bringing familiar landmarks back again.