Helen Farish was born in Cumbria where she now lives. Her debut collection, Intimates (Cape, 2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand (2012), The Dog of Memory (2016), which was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017, and The Penny Dropping (2023). Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017.
The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish’s verse-sequence about a love relationship, could be called a page-turner if it weren’t for the fact that every page is a lyric poem of such compulsion that it unfailingly and hauntingly detains the reader’s attention. As a whole, it has all the coherence of a novel; but there is so much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised master of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree. -- Bernard O'Donoghue This book is Farish’s third – her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection – and it is a confident performance. Farish’s poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much)…. The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet… working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall. -- Leaf Arbuthnot * Times Literary Supplement * Her locations are as varied as you’d expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours… A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish’s poems. -- Carol Rumens * The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory] * Helen Farish knows intimately who she is and her beautiful poems capture the intense sadness of memories recalled as the years pass. The poems are wonderfully, closely crafted. She is possessed by memory, but it is a memory that is both painful and illuminating. They are poems which are deeply felt, and though they read as though they draw intensely on her own life, their power to move comes from their reticence, from what is not said, but is deeply understood and quietly acknowledged. -- Steve Matthews * Cumberland News [on The Dog of Memory] *