Natalie Ann Holborow is a Swansea-born writer of poetry and fiction. In 2015, she won both the Terry Hetherington Award and the Robin Reeves Prize, and in 2016 was named as runner-up in the Wales PENCymru New Voices Award. She has been recommended and shortlisted for various others including the Bridport Prize and Hippocrates Prize. Natalie’s work has recently appeared in The Stinging Fly and the New Welsh Review.
Her debut poetry collection And Suddenly You Find Yourself is due to be published with Parthian in March 2017. The poems in this collection explore what it means to be human: where the mythological meets the modern, where fairytales, family and revenge collide, and a haunting mix of love, loss, desire, fear and revenge that is unafraid to unsettle the reader.
This remarkable collection of work finds people at their most vulnerable: Achilles counting to ten outside a psychiatrist’s door, a man finding himself in the shrinking bedroom of his mid-life, a lost sister chain-smoking into the breeze or a TB victim hacking her rags of lung softly into a pillow. Each one unflinchingly reveals the truth about what it means to be real. The people in this book may surprise you, their lives may be startlingly varied, but Natalie Ann Holborow’s poems are an engaging, unnerving and honest exploration of the human experience in all its beauty and rawness.
And Suddenly You Find Yourself was launched at the biggest book fair in the world, The Kolkata Book Festival where Natalie has been taking part in The Valley, The City, The Village project. Welsh and Indian writers are travelling between the two countries respectively, engaging with newly discovered cultures through writing poetry, prose, blogs and stories. Contributions will result in an anthology featuring all writers combined, due to be published by Parthian in 2018.
