Philip Gross has lived and worked in South Wales since 2004. He has published some twenty solo collections of poetry, most recently The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022). The Water Table won the T.S.Eliot Prize 2009, and Love Songs of Carbon the Roland Mathias Award (Wales Book of The Year) 2016. He is a keen collaborator, e.g. with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold In The River (Seren, 2015), with Australian poet-artist Jenny Pollak on Shadowplay (Flarestack, 2018) and with scientists from the National Museum of Wales on a science-based poetry collection for young people, Dark Sky Park (Otter-Barry Books, 2018). A Part of the Main – a conversation in poems between Philip Gross and Lesley Saunders on themes of migration, exile and loss of home or language – appeared from Mulfran in 2019, and Troeon/Turnings, a book of ‘translaboration’ – mutual translations/responses between him and Welsh language poet Cyril Jones – from Seren in 2021. A new collection, The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe, November 2024) revisits his father’s homeland of Estonia.
