Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2015, Kate’s first collection The Observances was profiled at the sparkly Prize giving event at Quaglino’s on 26 January almost as if it had won! Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets actually won for poetry and Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree for Book of the Year.
The Costa judges’ citation commends Kate’s book as ‘painterly, sensuous and sonically vibrant’. If you haven’t time to read fifty poems, read the most recent review in The Observer, 3 Jan 2016. Look for Poetry Book of the Month in which Kate Kellaway writes with huge enthusiasm about the book, its maritime character, ‘found’ objects and landscape.
The cover painting is a detail from Christopher Le Brun’s stunning and huge canvas ‘Neither White Nor Warm Nor Cold’, 2013, last seen in New York.
Now reprinted for 2016 The Observances has been available from bookshops and on Kindle since 30 April 2015. South London independents, Rye Books, Village Books, Dulwich Books, Chener Books and Herne Hill Bookshop, all carry copies, some are signed.
The first review by Rob Mackenzie is in Magma 62 and amongst others that appeared later, there is a good one in the Dundee Review of Arts by Beth Mc Donough. Kate was interviewed on Wednesday 18 Nov at breakfast time for BBC Radio Devon because Plymouth is her birthplace. She spoke to Simon Bates alongside Kate Hamer, who lives in Devon, also Costa shortlisted for the debut novel, The Girl in the Red Coat.
John Dugdale in The Guardian Review of 22 Nov called Kate “the oddball” in an otherwise all male list for poetry and pointed out that she is thirty years older than the youngest selected poet. And madder or wiser as the case may be…
Jenny Lewis reports in the Poetry Society’s newsletter on The Place for Poetry, a conference held at Goldsmiths in May, and begins her list of “Festival highlights” with “Kate Miller reading from her debut Carcanet collection.”
Kate’s article: Why I am Not a Painter: is up on the Carcanet author blog from May 2015. http://carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/why-i-am-not-painter-by-kate-miller.html