The Anatomical Venus

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and teaches for UEA/National Centre for Writing online. She has published six collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013) and The Anatomical Venus (2019), and Constructing a Witch, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (2024). Fool's World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of collage/mixed media poems, Hear What the Moon Told Me, was published KFS in 2017, a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, by SurVision in 2019, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. The Anatomical Venus was shortlisted for the poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2019. The cover of The Anatomical Venus, which features her own artwork, won the East Anglian Writers Book by the Cover Award (East Anglian Book Awards 2019). Her work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. She lives in Norwich.