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Hebden Bridge writer short listed for prestigious award

Friday, 12 June 2015

Peter RileyLocal writer Peter Riley has been short listed for this year's Forward Arts Foundation prize for Due North. The award is worth £10,000 and the winner will be announced at the awards ceremony on 28th September at Southbank.

Peter's collection has been described as 'a blend of landscape, historical lyric and blazing human connection'. Others have called it a commentary on man's movement into northern realms. Peter has moved to Hebden from Cambridge in the last few years.

Peter's collection has been described as 'a blend of landscape, historical lyric and blazing human connection'. Others have called it a commentary on man's movement into northern realms. Peter has moved to Hebden from Cambridge in the last few years.

Other members of his family live in the town.

Peter Riley has written of Due North, "Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps. The cast includes migrant workers, returning soldiers, children growing up, and population movements such as the early 19th-century descent on the northern manufacturing districts from demographic disaster zones, with my awareness of my own ancestry among the displaced Irish of Manchester and West Yorkshire. Woven into this are various artistic, poetical, cultural and instinctive ventures to traverse cold and emptiness, limit and futility, in the hope of attaining the metaphor of lasting warmth. Its pattern is that of a long sequence of beginnings, some of which reach their conclusions, usually elsewhere in the text, some of which don't. The textual mode is literal and lyrical, to posit the value of these two forces in sustaining hope."

His books can be found at The Bookcase shop on Market Street, alongside those of other esteemed local writers.

Peter Riley's Wikipedia page states that "Peter Riley (born 1940) is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group vaguely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".