Hero and the Girl Next Door

Hannah Sophie

The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the "memorability test" with flying colours. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than "social verse". An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.

About the Author

Sophie Hannah was born in Manchester in 1971. In 2004 she was selected as one of the twenty Next Generation poets, and has now published five collections of poetry. Her crime novels have been published in more than 35 countries, and have been adapted for television in the UK. Her Hercule Poirot novel "The Monogram Murders" was published worldwide in September 2014. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and children,

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