Women in Comfortable Shoes

"Selima Hill is an inimitable talent. The mind is fragile and unreliable in her poetry, but is also tenacious and surprising, capable of the most extraordinary responses, always fighting back with language as its survival kit. Life in general might be said to be her subject, the complications, contradictions and consequences of simply existing. Nevertheless, Hill's writing is eminently readable and approachable, even fun at times, the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones." - Simon Armitage, UK Poet Laureate, on behalf of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry Committee

'Selima Hill is a one-off, and her restless magpie mind unpicks the fragile seams of everyday experience, revealing the darkness beneath. We can choose to laugh, or we can choose to cry, but there's no easy escape from the disconcerting experiences Hill promises her reader.' - John Field, for the T.S. Eliot Prize, on Men Who Feed Pigeons

'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine...Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets

'She is truly gifted. She invests mundane things with visionary, delirious brilliance.' - Graham Swift, The Sunday Times