Poetry,
fiction,
memoir
…..made in Sheffield!
Photo by Emma Ledwith
Tattoos mainly by Sheffield artists including
Trey and Holly (Vaudeville @ Arley Street)
El Rose
Freyja Smith @ Elysium
Jakob Isaac
Lou Hopper
About The Author
I’m an award-winning author based in Sheffield. I have published three poetry collections (Division Street, 2013 and No Map Could Show Them, 2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022, shortlisted for the Forward Prize). I’ve also written a novel (Black Car Burning, 2019), a short story collection (Exire, 2019) and I also write drama and creative non fiction.
My first full length non-fiction book A Line Above The Sky (Ebury, 2022) was featured in the Guardian and Evening Standard’s ‘books to watch’ lists. I have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Prize and won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize in 2015. I appear regularly on BBC radio and sometimes on TV. I’ve taught creative writing for over ten years and am a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. I offer freelance mentoring and run workshops. I’m a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I collaborate with artists and musicians and am interested in interdisciplinary work of all kinds.
“Helen Mort is among the brightest stars in the sparkling new constellation of British poets” -
Carol Ann Duffy
What people say
‘Helen Mort is unmistakably one of the most brilliant poets of her generation, Black Car Burning shows her to be a remarkable novelist too.’ - Robert Macfarlane
‘Mort, in a beautifully accomplished debut, has blended a rich alloy: a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing’. - Catherine Taylor, The Guardian
‘Bold, imaginative….intensely realistic…. Mort writes brilliantly about the physical presence of the city….(Black Car Burning) is frequently exhilarating in its accurate sympathy with some inch-perfect dialogue and astute observation throughout. Poet writes gripping novel: now there’s something you don’t hear every day.’ - Sean O’Brien, Times Literary Supplement
‘Mort’s assurance keeps us on edge, but trustful. One could say she doesn’t put a foot wrong.’ - Peter Scupham
“Superb young Sheffield poet” - Financial Times
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“This is a book of the seen and unseen; on being alive; on being wild; on being a woman. This book is about being a woman - both seen and unseen - alive and wild - in a world that needs new words for every single part of this. And my oh my, how Mort writes those new words.”
- Caught By The River review of A Line Above The Sky
Get in touch for readings, workshops, commissions, mentoring.
Agent - Matthew Turner, Rogers Coleridge and White