Sarah Salway Says You Don't Need Another Self-Help Book

Sarah Salway is a kind of Renaissance Woman: she does so many different things, and does them well - from writing novels and short stories to circus skills, garden history and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro - she's a true inspiration. I feel incredibly lucky not just to be her friend but to have co-tutored an Arvon Foundation short story course with her last year - I have no doubt I learnt as much from her as our students did. And she kept me sane with regular infusions of chocolate, and the odd drop of whisky...

Here's her official bio: 

Sarah Salway is Canterbury Laureate and Royal Literature Fund Fellow at the London School of Economics. You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book is her first poetry collection, and she is the author of three novels (Something Beginning With, Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture) and a collection of short stories, Leading the Dance. Her poems have won significant prizes in competitions organised by Poetry London, the Essex Poetry Festival and The New Writer, and have appeared in publications including the Financial Times, The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, Mslexia, Pen International and Poetry London. Sarah is the Chair of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society.

So, this brings me to my joy at hosting Sarah here today to showcase her new book - her first collection of poetry, You Don't Need Another Self Help Book, published by Pindrop Press. Isn't the cover stunning?

Sarah is doing an audio blog tour - the first time I've hosted anything like this, and today she is reading us an excellent poem I heard her read live (at the same reading where I, with great terror, read out my first poem!)  called Love and Stationery. Listen and enjoy...

It's no wonder Philip Gross called her collection

[s]ubtly angled glimpses of love, sex, marriage, which reveal them as they really are: matters of life and death. There's a quiet sizzling underneath the surface of these poems, which can make you smile and wince at the same time.

You may not need another self-help book but you do need this one. Buy it here. You know you want to... You can find out more about Sarah on SarahSalway.net, and listen to her read another poem over at Danuta Kean's website. What fun!