Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle is a well-known feminist poet and novelist.

Her poetry is represented in many anthologies and her most recent book, SELECTED POEMS 1980-1996, was published by Oxford University Press.

From 1968 to 1980 she published five highly praised novels. With her husband, Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of THE WISE WOUND: MENSTRUATION AND EVERYWOMAN, first published in 1978 and now in its sixth edition. Its sequel, ALCHEMY FOR WOMEN: PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH DREAMS AND THE FEMALE CYCLE appeared in 1995.

She lives in Cornwall.

Penelope Shuttle's latest collection is a book of lament and celebration. Its focus is the life and death of her husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, coupled with the loss of her father. Here, grief, depression and ageing are confronted with painful directness, but transformed into life-affirming and redemptive poetry. Other poems written over the same five-year period are inspired by a wide variety of subjects, from Cornish history and landscape to time, weather, spiders and postal regulations. Some draw on myth and dream to reinvent reality, while others take surprising liberties with language itself.

Penelope Shuttle writes: 'Despite Peter's worsening health, many of the poems take as their task the search for a renewal of life during difficult circumstances. How to go on loving the world, which is what a poet is for, when it deals you severe blows, forcing you to give up much of what gives life its energy and delight. My years as a carer for Peter and the sadness of witnessing his decline into frailty due to a combination of Parkinson's, arthritis and diabetes, were a time when I fought off depression and anger, not always successfully, but turned to poetry as channel for and transformer of such emotions. After Peter died, it was poetry that provided me with "the proper consolations of human loneliness".'

REDGROVE'S WIFE was shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize for Best Collection.