Food for the Dead

Gathering the tribes of the living and the dead, wooing the ghosts of history and the present, these are compelling testimonies in defence of dream (which is to say memory) against death (which is to say oblivion); a book of poems (which is to say spells) that insist, despite all the evidence, that language can still be a crystal ball through which we can see all our departed loves. Here history comes alive, which is to say it comes to hurt us again. A beautiful, necessary book – Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
Opening Food for the Dead, I was not prepared for the sheer force of its telling: in poem after poem about grandmothers, unendurable hunger and the glorious intransigence of survival, Shevchenko Knight generates an irresistible momentum that carries the reader into a world at once familiar and strange, where an improbable beauty and nobility of spirit coexist with routine corruption, needless misery and the casual brutality of totalitarianism – John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone
Food for the Dead will break your heart and feed your soul. Every line holds the truth, the collective memories of Ukraine beyond history books and news headlines. I have been waiting for poems like this for years – every one of them a masterpiece – Olia Hercules, author of Mamushka
These poems are hungry, burning, outraged and tender; they will make your mouth water while simultaneously hollowing your bones. An astonishing, lacerating, unforgettable debut, full of acutely evocative poems of food and famine in Ukraine, and of an adolescence lived in the shadow of trauma and extreme hunger. These are poems of deep beauty, furious survival, and abiding familial love – Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron
Simply radiating… The writing filled me with a longing for home I had concealed within my inner chambers – Eric Ngalle Charles, author of I, Eric Ngalle
This extraordinary, beautiful book combines the personal and the political: Ukraine’s tragic past and bloody present providing the backdrop to poems about grandparents, hunger, childhood, and collective memory – all of them poignant and pitch-perfect – Luke Harding, author of Invasion
These poems break an opening through into a space and time that is both vast – from Soviet famine to present-day invasion, from England to Donetsk - and intimate: kitchen work, coal dust, pickles. With great clarity, Shevchenko Knight evokes a Ukraine where the very food is haunted by memories of mass hunger, where for her grandparents it is hope, defiance, love, simply to be and to do – James Meek, author of The People’s Act of Love

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a writer of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut poetry collection Food for the Dead, published by Jonathan Cape in 2024, was a winner of an Eric Gregory Award, the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection UK and a Somerset Maugham Award. Shevchenko Knight is a Manchester City Poet and is completing her PhD at the Manchester Writing School.

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