Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin is a multi-award-winning writer, essayist and poet based in Grasmere, Cumbria, where she has worked and researched at Dove Cottage, home of the Wordsworths. Her first poetry collection,Β Basic Nest ArchitectureΒ (Seren: 2017), won a Northern Wrtierβs Award and was followed by a third pamphlet,Β With Invisible RainΒ (New Walk: 2018). Her first pamphlet,Β bone songΒ (Aussteiger, 2008), was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, 2009, and second,Β Shadow DispatchesΒ (Seren, 2013), won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012.Β Recovering Dorothy,Β a biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, was published by Saraband in 2021.
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Dorothy Wordsworth is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798β1803) and as the sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life. Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brotherβs success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness,Β this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from herΒ brotherβs shadow and back into her own life story.
Prizes and awards
LONGLISTED Barbellion Prize 2022
REVIEWS OF Recovering Dorothy
βThe Wordsworths provide β¦ a treasure trove for authors, but this unusual book about Dorothy Wordsworth β¦ is all about her illness. Iβve never seen that subject covered before.β Hunter Davies, Cumbria Life
βDorothy Wordsworthβs life is not worth less when, as Atkin reveals through scholarship and poetry, her βkeen eyeβ is βturned not just on the world around her, but on the world inside.ββ Iona Glen
βPolly Atkin argues for Dorothyβs place in the writing of illness β¦ A narrowing world, she reminds us, need not lead to a narrowing of the self.β Guardian
βA timely reappraisal β¦told with great sensitivity and β¦ a grounded perspective of Dorothyβs everyday life in the Lakeland landscape.β Cumbria Life, Book of the Month
βA fresh, often deeply affecting reappraisal β¦ breaks new ground β¦ The restraint and spareness of Atkinβs writing is extremely powerful β¦ almost leap[ing] off the page.β European Romantic Review
