About the Author

Fiona Benson lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters. She has published three previous collections of poetry, all of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize- Bright Travellers, which won the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Prize for First Full Collection, Vertigo & Ghost, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and won both the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ephemeron, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the London Hellenic Prize.

Reviews

Benson retells the Greek myth... in a long-lined, novelistic sequence of rare psychological plausibility: yes, you think, yes, that's exactly how it happened.
*Telegraph, *20 Best Poetry Books of 2022**

Benson's third collection Ephemeron is split between nature, motherhood and Greek myth. But few poets write on these themes so brilliantly; Benson's urgent compassion makes us care.
*Daily Telegraph*

A new collection of Benson's wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted.
*Guardian*

There have been a number of impressive reshapings of classical tales in recent years, and it is a bold poet who would risk comparison with Alice Oswald and Anne Carson, but Benson's 'Translations from the Pasiphaë' earns its place alongside their works ... In Ephemeron, Fiona Benson's capacity for capturing bodily sympathy in verse manifests as something like a superpower.
*Literary Review*

There is a gorgeous, sunbleached quality to much of this writing, which stuns and scorches. It will be a pleasure to see which cycles of myth Benson takes on next.
*Times Literary Supplement*

Ephemeron was one of those books I had to put down and process what I had read – the images were stunningly gripping, visceral and unflinching.
*Poetry Society, *Books of the Year**