Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2011.
Shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2012.
Loudness is the beautiful debut collection from Judy Brown. Her poetry combines a straightforward manner with artful complexity, a gift for ironic humour with exacting observations of the everyday. Titles like ‘The ExPats’, ‘The P45’ and ‘The Crash’ kick-start edgy narratives, full of characters who will suffer for their modern sins.
Baroque stylings, sudden modulations in tone and register, and a keenly sensuous appreciation of the physical world complete this outstanding and original new collection.
“Her writing is direct and sensuous, alive to colour, touch, and above all, sound.”
Kate Bingham, Poetry London
Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and has lived in Northumbria, Cumbria and Hong Kong. She studied English Literature at Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne and now lives between London and Derbyshire. She won the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize and the 2009 Poetry London Competition, and received the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Poetry Prize in 2005. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Basil Bunting Poetry Award, and has placed in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and others. Her poems have appeared in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade (2010) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2006. She is also the author of a prize-winning pamphlet, Pillars of Salt (Templar Poetry, 2006).