It was a long and winding journey to the publication of Sam Willett’s first collection of powerful and exquisitely crafted poems, New Light for The Old Dark, published by Jonathan Cape in 2010. The collection was well received and shortlisted for the Forward, Costa and TS Eliot prizes. The poems feature his mother’s escape as a young girl from the Nazis, and touch on Englishness, secular Jewishness, and Oxfordshire where Willetts grew up.
Not new to critical success he won the Bridgeport Prize for Poetry in 1996 and has had poems published in Granta, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and the Observer, among others. He is currently working on a new collection which will also feature places in the UK that have inspired Willets and pen portraits of friends.