Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. He received his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Brunel University in 2015. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His pocketbook, Beloved, in case you've been wondering was published by Donut Press in 2011. He co-edits the online journal Poems in Which and teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. His first book-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice for Winter 2017, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and is shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2018 . The final poem in the collection, 'Short', won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2016.

Books by Wayne Holloway-Smith:

Other poems on the web by Wayne Holloway-Smith:
Two poems

Wayne Holloway-Smith on Twitter.

About Alarum:

"Alarum is a collection composed in the "mournful shadows", skulking beneath your window at that very hour of a sleepless night when you feel most alone, to deliver up to you its glorious, melancholy verdict on living. By turns abject, bereft, exultant and belligerent, the poems' voices reckon with the things we can't get hold of (or get rid of) via a kind of reification, whereby non-material things – air, anxiety, heartbreak – take on an unbearable substance. Thus Wayne Holloway-Smith – "Magic Wayne with flowers", among other incarnations — finds himself negotiating with the objects or creatures that 'fell out' of his mind, becoming real: a population of crows that need 'constant attention', or a Punch and Judy still wielding weapons. Always concerned with what happens in the margins, Alarum's own margins are full of violence – the violence that occurs at society's edges and the violence entailed when pulling back from those edges amounts to a kind of self-erasure. "Alarum" also means 'a call to arms' and, in speaking its fears aloud, this is a collection of poems that fights back."
—Emily Berry

"There's an awful lot of poetry about these days. You can barely walk across the living room without stubbing your toe on a bit or getting some in your eye. But the thing is, not much of that poetry (in fact almost none of it) is actually poetry. Mostly it's just wearing an outfit that gives it the appearance of being poetry so it can pass itself off as such to the undiscerning or the unhurt. The most important thing I'd say about Wayne Holloway-Smith's book is that it actually is, unmistakably, poetry. When you look inside it you find yourself go quiet because you recognise that someone with a peculiar openness has been still and listened to the world and written down what it said. This book is funny, clever, serious, touching, and extraordinarily imaginative. Also it has a certain unguarded gentleness about it, by that I mean, it has a certain old-fashioned courtesy, the courtesy of the gent. That is a rare quality too I think. To recommend it sounds a bit glib. But I unequivocally do."
—Mark Waldron