Fran Lock

Dec 9, 2024 | fivebooks.com | Martina Evans |Fran Lock |Patrick McGuinness |Samantha Dickey

Thanks for speaking to us about the inaugural Heaney Prize shortlist. Can you talk us through what the prize seeks to recognise? The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which is generously supported by the Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, a book of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.

May 7, 2024 | culturematters.org.uk | Fran Lock |Alan Morrison |Terry Eagleton

In the closing Winter Lecture for the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton discusses the origin and uses of culture. Half-way through the piece, Fran Lock and Alan Morrison provide a complementary chorus of new poems. We are deeply grateful to the LRB and 'the dreadful Terry Eagleton', as King Charles called him, for their kind permissions to republish his lecture.

Feb 24, 2024 | brokensleepbooks.com | Frances Kruk |Fran Lock |Verity Spott |Sarah Bernstein

Released April 30th, 2024 // 978-1-916938-94-6 // 118 pages // RRP £10.99Broken sleep and disturbed dreams, or vice versa. A compilation of modernity’s conditions needs to include insomnia, accompaniment to work stress, twitchy doomscrolling, existential dread, memories of minor indignities, hectic feelings of a lack of control, shame.

Jul 11, 2023 | poetrysociety.org.uk | Fran Lock

And he says I have this hardly originalhole inside of me; that I am two thingsinfinitely: carnal and futile. He’s right. I am a bad wife, a wanting quarryof witless worry; lank rage, grim schlock,and stroppy poverty. I am sleazed inthe green of The Land, raining downher birdsong in blows. The dubbycrush of my keening does his head in. I sink kisses into screams like pushingpennies into mud. And he says he is done.