Photograph by Nadav Kander
Sarah Hall | Podcast
Sarah Hall & Saskia Vogel
Sarah Hall speaks to Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.
Shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry

Up Late
‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died in 2021 of Covid-19. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Amnion
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
From Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, published by Granta Books and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

How Prayer Works
‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’
A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from his shortlisted collection Pilgrim Bell, first published in Granta 156: Interiors.

Three Poems
‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’
Poetry by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for Cain Named the Animal.

Two Poems
‘Would / the apple be concerned / if I said it was not an apple’
Poems by Padraig Regan, from Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of five novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently the only author to be four times shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, which she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques’.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel
Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission, her debut novel, about love, loss and BDSM, was published in four languages in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Lina Wolff, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru, and Katrine Marcal, whose Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is published by Portobello Books. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Guernica, the White Review, the Offing, Paris Review Daily, LitHub and Two Lines. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s publicist.
Photograph © Fette Sans