My Family and Other Superheroes - Softcover

Winner of the 2014 Costa Poetry Award

“We haven’t had as much fun reading a poetry collection in ages. Joyous, brilliant and moving – this is a poet to celebrate.” – The Costa Judges

Leaping from the pages, jostling for position alongside the Valleys mams, dads, and bamps, and described with great warmth, the superheroes in question are a motley crew: Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun, and a recalcitrant hippo. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a postindustrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

Jonathan Edwards marries an authentic colloquial voice with sound technique to produce poems which recognize the exotic in everyday life, and a first collection which, remarkably, has won the Costa Prize for Poetry 2014.

Jonathan Edwards has written for Big Issue Cymru magazine, written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government, and currently works as an English teacher. He won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales new writer’s bursary in 2011, and in 2012 won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Poetry Review, the North, Poetry Wales, and New Welsh Review.