Winner of the Forward Prize for best first collection, 2008
Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2008.
Costa Book Awards 2008 Judges' comment:"This first collection is witty, humane, confident, full of everyday details but with a capacity to surprise and delight."
Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in Kathryn Simmonds´ first collection engage with both the quotidian and the transcendental. Often in urban or suburban settings, her protagonists struggle with mundane tasks such as cooking or commuting or office work - all of the obstacles of modernity - and then, by some shift of attention, or by some keen narrowing of focus, they chance upon the surreal or the spiritual. This is a poetry of subtle contexts and allusions, as much as concerned with the vulnerability of the body as for the fate of the soul and the idea of ´keeping faith´ in God and life.
"An expansive imagination, a wide formal range, wit and humanity - ´Sunday at the Skin Laundrette´ is a remarkable debut." - Michael Symmons Roberts
"Quirky, witty, moving Kathryn Simmonds´ gift is to find joy and beauty in unexpected places. She invests the everyday world with an extraordinary luminosity." - Jackie Kay
“This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism” – Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian
Author
About Kathryn Simmonds
Kathryn Simmonds’ poetry collection Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The London Magazine and The Barcelona Review, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her second poetry collection is The Visitations (2013) and she was the first poet-in-residence at The Charles Causley Trust in 2013/14. Her first novel Love and Fallout was a winner in the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and is published by Seren. She lives with her family in north Cornwall.
