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Alice Hillier (Poetry, 2019)

Alice Hillier

Shortlisted in 2019 for Poetry

Alice Hiller is a London-based writer and poet whose work centres around the themes of trauma and the scope for creative resistance and transformation.

Hiller started writing poetry in 2o14 after spending some time working on an experimental novel – Pomegranate – that responded to her experience of being sexually abused by her mother from the ages of 8 to 13. aperture, her work-in-progress poetry collection, and spectroscope, its partner publication, see Hiller working towards finding forms of language to articulate difficult experiences in order to contribute to the process of changing awareness around the sexual abuse of children.

Hiller aims for aperture and spectroscope to harness the potential for transformations implicit in art and expand the boundaries of possibility within poetry. To help the reader encounter difficult material with as much safety as possible, she runs the poems along ‘channels of beauty and play’, with the intention to create spaces for them to engage and generate their own responses.

Hiller’s work uses imagery to somatise experience, and investigate the ways in which trauma can impact language. She also experiments with the expressive potential of silence and compression, and of ‘spacing as a marker of the in-articulable’.