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Fiona Benson

Fiona Benson’s collection Bright Travellers, received the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection and the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second book, Vertigo & Ghost, is the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019, the Roehampton Prize for Best Poetry Colleciton 2019, and is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.

Fiona Benson on Granta.com

Poetry | The Online Edition

Poetry | The Online Edition

Three Poems

Fiona Benson

‘She offered herself in return / for her decimated town.’

‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë on Her Granddaughter, Apemosyne’ and ‘The Chimp House’ by Fiona Benson.

Poetry | The Online Edition

Poetry | The Online Edition

Vertigo & Ghost

Fiona Benson

Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.

Poetry | Issue 144

Poetry | Issue 144

Zeus

Fiona Benson

‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’

In Conversation | Issue 126

In Conversation | Issue 126

Interview

Fiona Benson & Rachael Allen

‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’

Poetry | Issue 126

Poetry | Issue 126

Demeter

Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Poetry | Issue 126

Poetry | Issue 126

Toboggan Run

Fiona Benson

‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’