Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'The Malarkey' won the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012). She has published eleven novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in Bristol.