Helen Dunmore Biography

British poet and novelist, born in Beverley, Yorkshire, educated at York University. Her first volume of poems, The Apple Fall (1983), was praised for its rhythmical assurance which is a characteristic of her verse. The Sea Skater (1986) fuses personal and familial experience with more general socio-cultural themes, which are conveyed by precise and fluent successions of images. Further volumes include The Raw Garden (1988), Short Days, Long Nights: New and Selected Poems (1991), Recovering a Body (1994), and Secrets (1994). Dunmore also turned to writing fiction with Zennor in Darkness (1993), a novel in which the First World War is viewed through the eyes of two couples, one real (Frieda and D. H. Lawrence), the other fictional. Her second novel, Burning Bright (1994), is an inventively constructed account of a young girl's gradual absorption into petty crime, and her relationship with her thuggish lover and the old lesbian neighbour who recounts her past in long monologues. A Spell in Winter (1995) is narrated in the first person by a girl drawn by loneliness into an incestuous love affair with her brother.