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Selima Hill was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2022, with special recognition given to Gloria: Selected Poems (2008). This draws on collections from 1984 to 2006 and includes Violet (1997), which was shortlisted for all three of the UK's major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, and Bunny (2001), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent Bloodaxe collections areMen Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023).
The collection is by turns surreal and direct, but always arresting. Her trademark humour is present throughout, but its wit can often surprise the reader, conveying truths in hilarious and sometimes shocking ways. The judges were impressed by Selima's mastery of the portrait in miniature - one of the judges calling her 'the UK's Emily Dickinson'. -- Forward Prize judges * on Selima Hill's Men Who Feed Pigeons * Like the authors of the classical epigrams that are these poems’ ultimate model, Hill uses a spare, brief span that can give gravity to light matters as well as supporting the weightiest. Hill’s poems, however small, feel complete. -- William Wootten * Literary Review, on Men Who Feed Pigeons * Born in 1945, Hill might be the heir to Stevie Smith: both are wholly original voices who pay no heed to anyone else’s idea of what a poem should be; funny writers whose humour can leave the reader startled, puzzled or uneasy as often as amused. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph, on Men Who Feed Pigeons *
