Shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot Prize

Set in "a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles," Terence Davies' film "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. This study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style.

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. Selected Poems takes stock of a singular talent of great formal gifts: for readers new to his work, this is an ideal and generous introduction, drawing on four collections from his acclaimed debut The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You to his most recent, The Dark Film. Farley is a cultural archivist, a nostalgist of the darkest and most unsettling kind, and a meticulous curator of those fleeting details which define our lives and times most poignantly: he already reads like one of the poets by whom...

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual it is impossible to summarize in terms of theme, as his interests are too various: there's an air of 'the innocence of childhood' being viewed through the corrective lens of worldly middle age, though, and also of mid-life, its creeping self-consciousness and decrepitude, and the distortions of perception that attend it; confusing encounters with tech, modernity and its accelerated rate of change; satirical excursions critiquing the way business and digital communications have debased language....