Missel-Child

Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969 and now lives in Liverpool. She studied philosophy at university and subsequently worked in publishing. She currently teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published two previous poetry collections with Carcanet Press, Missel-Child (2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize, 2015) and City of Departures (2019, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, 2019). She is collaborating with writer and musician Martin Heslop on text and sound work developed from a residency in 2019 at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia, some of which can be seen here. Since 2009, Helen has been involved with a Merseyside-based project focused on the Wirral-born novelist Malcolm Lowry, and has co-edited (with Bryan Biggs) two books on Lowry: Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool UP, 2009) and Remaking the Voyage: New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea (Liverpool UP, 2019). She is currently working on a creative non-fiction book about her engagement with the work of Lowry and Elizabeth Bishop and, through them, with place and landscape.