About the Author

Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. He received his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Brunel University in 2015. He co-edits the online journal Poems in Which and teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. His pocketbook, Beloved, in case you've been wondering was published by Donut Press in 2011, and he won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016. His first book-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice for Winter 2017, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017 and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2018, and was also longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. He won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016. His chapbook, I Can't Wait for the Wending, was published by Test Centre Publications in 2018. He won the National Poetry Competition 2018 for 'the posh mums are boxing in the square' from his second book-length book of poetry, Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Love Minus Love was also a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020 and the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021. His pamphlet length poem Lobsters was published by Pakina Press in 2022. In October 2022 he was appointed Editor of The Poetry Review, the quarterly magazine of The Poetry Society.

Reviews

I rejoice in Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems, and I miss them when I'm not reading them. Love Minus Love is a gorgeous painful classic of the Dead Dad genre, and the We Are All Meat genre and the Re-Building Mum genre. It is a beautiful tapestry-album of boy agony, wit and honesty, punctuated by devastating in-parentheses-bildungsromans. It's unforgettably brilliant.
*Max Porter*

Exciting, excoriating, gorgeous, appalling, and eye-wateringly honest. Wayne Holloway-Smith's poems are blisteringly beautiful, and probe at a siege-like nucleus of familial harm. Histories of abuse, hurt and disease are confronted and dissected in all their messy, meaty complexity, but always with love, always with hope and a sweet, sweet tenderness. One of the truest poets writing today.
*Fiona Benson*