My debut poetry collection, The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning, will be published by Seren Books on 14th April, and pre-orders are now available here: https://www.serenbooks.com/book/the-opposite-of-swedish-death-cleaning/

I’m delighted to be able to reveal the cover art, which was created by my friend Kate Winter, author and illustrator of The Fossil Hunter.

Kate is brilliant to work with: I can share with her a general sense of what I’m looking for, and then she goes on to create something that somehow captures what I had been trying to describe, but in a way that I could never have imagined.

In this case, Kate picked up on the idea of the importance of the objects I had retrieved from my parents’ house, and the resonance they carry. This led her to experiment with cyanotype, which is an early form of photography using sunlight to create impressions of objects on paper. I loved the vivid blue of Kate’s early drafts, and the idea of objects leaving a physical impression in this way fitted the mood of the book perfectly.

Kate then borrowed a box of treasured objects from my parents’ house to create the final image, which deploys a combination of cyanotype, hand drawn and digital art images, juxtaposed in a collage.

Alongside providing a beautiful cover for the collection, I’m so pleased that these precious family objects have been captured by Kate in this way. Amongst them you can spot the reindeer from our Christmas cake, both my parents’ chalk tins, my grandmother’s handwritten recipe book, two milk bottles from my 1980s collection, some Guess Who cards, and an iconic Charles and Diana tea caddy.

When you read the poems in the collection, you’ll be able to spot some of these objects featuring in particular poems.