I’m a poet and a fiction writer.  I love both forms, and enjoy the challenge of moving between the two. In October 2010 Yes, my poetry collection published by Hawthorn Press was awarded the prize for the best poetry book of the year in the East Anglian Book Awards. The title poem is given below. You can buy the book for £5 by emailing me at the address given on the Contacts page.

I’ve got my nose stuck into the Diary of Samuel Pepys right now as I’m drafting a series of poems about his life, his marriage, his family and household. The poems will appear in my new collection to be published by Hawthorn Press in September 2012.  I’m also working on a series of poems based on my grandmothers. Interesting stuff.                

I’m continuing to work with Inprint (www.inprintartsandpoetry.co.uk) and the Paston Heritage Society (www.pastonheritage.co.uk) on projects combining poetry, drama and visual arts. A small group of poets are presenting a performance piece of poetry, prose and song about Margaret Paston, at St Peter Hungate, Norwich, on Saturday 9 June at 7 pm.  We’ll be joined by a consort of viols playing music from the period, so it’ll be a special evening.  Entrance is only £7. 

I offer mentoring on a one-to-one basis, run workshops, and teach at the University of East Anglia and the Open University.

Welcome to my site.  If you want to contact me, please do.  I’d love to hear from you. 

Biography

Caroline Gilfillan was brought up in Sussex and spent her formative years in east London writing, playing in various bands, and working in publishing and education.  She came to Norfolk after taking an MA in Creative Writing.  A fiction writer, poet, and dramatist, she was selected for the Escalator scheme for fiction writers in 2007, and awarded a grant from Arts Council England in 2008. Her novel, Petal and Dot, traces the progress of an evacuated child and her mother in London during the Second World War. 

Yes, her new poetry collection, published by the Hawthorn Press, won the award for the best poetry book in the East Anglian Book Awards in October 2010.  She’s written poetry all her life, and her early work was published in Seven Women and One Foot on the Mountain.  Her poem The Painter was nominated for the Forward Prize for the best individual poem in 2007 and her work appeared in the Forward Collection of Poetry in the same year.  She was a winner of the North West Poetry competition in 2000, and Drowned in Overspill, a collection of her poetry, was published by Crocus Booksin the same year. In 2008 she won the Café Writers prize for the best poem by a Norfolk poet. She won the Poetry-next-the-Sea competition in 2011 for a poem that will form part of a collection drawing on the life and diaries of Samuel Pepys.   

In 2007/2008 she was a winner of Channel 4’s The Radio Play’s the Thing competition. She’s won several national short story competitions, and her poems and short stories have appeared recently in The London Magazine, Poetry News and Mslexia.  She’s currently developing fiction, dramas for radio and stage, and a second collection of poetry.

She’s recently taken to the stage again with Dee Welding in the duo Songbirds, and with the reformed Stepney Sisters, the trail-blazing feminist rock band.  She can be contacted via the contact page of this website.

Yes 

Shipped back after shrapnel
has sliced one eye,
you’ll be lounging one damp July afternoon
against the warehouse doors, a Woodbine
fogging your hawk head.  Your hair will be
clipped, oiled, dark as bitterest French coffee.
Your boots will be slick-shined, your collar
loose on the pulse of a sunburnt throat.

ATS Privates will skitter past, holding their
caps in flurries of rain.  One will stumble. 
You’ll notice the slender cast of her skull,
the span of her mouth.  You’ll like the protractor
angles of elbows and knees.  You’ll notice
her ankles gloved in translucent skin.    

You’ll grab her wrist, stop her from slipping,
stop her from blooding her darned stockings. 
The odour of blankets piled in the shed,
smelling of sheep, smelling of the grassy
dip behind a horse’s pricked ears, will
merge with the breath of a home perm, 
a blouse hand-scrubbed in Fairy soap. 

Your injured eye will throb.  You’ll think
of porridge, of tea, of a dip in a bed.
You’ll ask if she’ll meet you in the mess.

And, after a pause, my mother will say Yes.

Samuel Pepys goes to Sea

So it had come to this. Your Lord’s low voice,
the raise of his eyebrows as he leant closer,
saying, I want someone I might trust in. 
Screwing your eyes shut for a second (feigning
a headache from too many raised healths to the King)
you looked into his good, plain face and said Yes.  Yes,
you would be his Secretary at sea.  Fuddy John Creed
could take his prayer breath and dew-drop nose
elsewhere.  Make way for Samuel Pepys Esquire.  Oh yes.    

Daybreak found an abundance of clients butting at the door:
seamen wanting work; your landlord, wanting the rent.
At your Lord’s office you were handed a great totter of papers,
to put in order and account for.  At the Admiralty you wondered
at the number who courted you.  Hired a boy, Ebenezer,
to serve you on ship, and a clerk, Mr Burr.  At home,
you sealed your will; gave your wife all you had in the world
except your English books, which were for brother John. 
Your wife wanted Cabbage, which you sent out for.  Oh, yes.  

There was advantage to be had.  Captain Williamson gave
a piece of gold and twenty shillings in silver for the
commission to be captain of the Harp.  Your shoe-maker,
swordsmith and hosier paid for a lunch well dunked in wine,
then offered rapier, gown, silver hatband, for future favour. 
Another fellow gave you a sugar-loaf and promised
a gawp at his pretty wife at The Ship tavern.  You had no time
to take up the latter and, cheeks burning, prayed to God
not to get too proud or too much lifted up hereby.  Oh, yes.

Before embarkation there was an infinite of business to do. 
For a start, you had to dispose of your wife. 
And, being your wife, she would dispute and sulk
until you bested her with pledges of gowns and pearls, and 
perhaps a servant to save her skin from blisters and scalds. 
Her tears dried.  With a side-smile she agreed to lodge
with the Bowyers in Bucks while you were at sea.
The two of you sank into a bed humming with prospects.
You nuzzled her soft breast.  Found it musky-sweet.  Oh, yes.

Caroline Gilfillan