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Tobias HillTobias Hill
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Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Poet and novelist Tobias Hill was born in London, England, on 30 March 1970. He read English at Sussex University and spent two years teaching in Japan.
He is the author of the collections of poetry Year of the Dog (1995), Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), influenced by his experiences living in Japan, and Zoo (1998), which coincided with his tenure as Poet in Residence at London Zoo as part of the Poetry Places scheme administered by the Poetry Society. He is also the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Skin (1997), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.
Adaptations of his poetry and short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He has also worked as rock critic for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in London and as the poetry editor of the Richmond Review. His fiction includes the novels Underground, published in 1999, a dark story set on the London Underground system; and The Love of Stones (2001), spanning six centuries in the tale of a long-lost jewel once owned by Elizabeth I. The book has been published in seven languages and in 11 countries and is being developed as a film by Granada Films. His third novel, The Cryptographer, the story of a mysterious and charming quadrillionaire, who is the creator of the world's first great electric currency, was published in 2003.
His latest novel is The Hidden (2009).
Tobias Hill lives in London and is Royal Society of Literature Fellow at Sussex University. In 2004, he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. His latest poetry collection is Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow (2006).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Poetry, Short stories
Bibliography
Year of the Dog National Poetry Foundation, 1995
Midnight in the City of Clocks Oxford University Press, 1996
Skin Faber and Faber, 1997
Zoo Oxford University Press, 1998
Underground Faber and Faber, 1999
The Love of Stones Faber and Faber, 2001
The Cryptographer Faber and Faber, 2003
Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow Salt Publishing, 2006
The Lion Who Ate Everything (illustrated by Michael Foreman) Walker Books, 2008
The Hidden Faber and Faber, 2009
Prizes and awards
1995 Eric Gregory Award
1997 Ian St James Award Skin
1997 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award Skin
2002 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) The Love of Stones
2004 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) The Cryptographer
Critical Perspective
Still only in his early thirties, Tobias Hill is a prize-winning poet and novelist who has successfully moved from small presses and little magazines to the mainstream media. A much-travelled figure, he was early on in his career associate editor of Trafika, a Prague-based journal, and he also worked on Britain's first Internet magazine. Now his poems have been carried around London on red buses, and he was poet in residence at Regent's Park Zoo during 1998. Hill reviews for The Observer and has previously been rock music critic for the Sunday Telegraph. More importantly, he is in the process of gaining a considerable reputation as a fiction writer. Skin, a book of short stories, won the 1997 PEN/Macmillan award, and two atmospheric thrillers, Underground (1999) and The Love of Stones (2001), published by Faber, have been highly praised.
One reviewer of his poems during the 1990s claimed that there was 'a fin de siècle decadence about them...not least in their brightly coloured diction, their luxuriant descriptiveness, their louche postures' (Poetry Wales). They are certainly pungent: full of colours, sensory impressions and odd human stories. Hill clearly appreciated Simon Armitage's storytelling persona; he also drew upon observation of the natural world in ways associated with Ted Hughes. And much of his imagery is by turns delicately 'Japanese', or reminiscent of the heyday of Craig Raine's 'Martian' style. But Hill has a romantic dimension in his work that is all his own. As a young man with an intense curiosity about the world, his work is full of sensual images, vignettes of city life - and romance. Attractive and even dangerous women turn up throughout, one even being simply observed asleep on an airport bench: 'Her tears are beautiful and shaped / like something poisonous; the sacs / of house-scorpions, the wasp's syringe ...' ('Transit'). His poetic manner is both lyric and descriptive. Hill's special territory, in poetry and prose, is the 'urban-pastoral'. So his native North London is transformed, with many deftly dark touches, into an uneasy realm of the imagination. His other poems have more of the travelogue about them, and a range of international settings: Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Spain - and recurrently in Japan.
His first two collections, Year of the Dog (1995) and Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), both do draw heavily on the two years that Hill spent living and working in Japan. The Englishman in Japan is a subject previously visited by poets such as D. J. Enright, Anthony Thwaite and Peter Robinson, but Hill's poems about the strange fascination of this culture are fresh and well observed. He describes a Sumo wrestler in a sushi bar ('His thighs flop down like sun-struck apes'), redundant 'salarymen' in a park, learns calligraphy, sees dragonflies and cicadas, and 'All along the waterfront, lights in water like barcodes' ('Hiroshima Midnight'). He also notes the city's beautiful modernity: 'a chameleon worm / of subway train turns whiskey-gold / between two love-hotels, tracks down / under a Coca-cola sign'. One sequence follows the course of a love affair over twelve months: ' She tells me that / her names translate as Three Four Sweet One / ... hides her face against the wind / and asks me to teach her to kiss' ('October').
The second section of Midnight in the City of Clocks returns to London, where there are 'Clouds the size of Regent's Park' and a 'fourteen-hour sunset'. In the title poem, Hill's narrator is a solitary nocturnal walker down mean streets - one of several who recur in his work. He heads down 'the empty lots / of outbuildings, asphalt road wet / as hair plastered to a forehead.../ The pavements hiss like fusepaper / pouring from the ghettos, rain acid as slag'. Another male figure finds himself on more ambiguous territory: 'Call me a poet, call me a voyeur...it's a kind of fear, it's something to do with being us' ('Playground at 2 a.m.'). These are poems of flirtation and desire: 'Your face is smooth and soft / as clingfilm. But, my love, your voice has claws' ('Sheep's Clothing). Hill's residency at the London Zoo clearly supplied him with rather more than just the title of his most recent collection, Zoo. The setting is perfect for his urban-pastoral minor dramas, his contemporary sense of nature continuing in the city. We first meet the staff: one of the keepers falls asleep 'before / the bored cough of a jaguar / echoes down Haven Street'. 'The Elephant Girl' 'dreams of chess. / The lathed pieces / turn under her horned palms / into the figures of new games'. We glimpse the animals, 'gibbons / howling for a yellow moon / in their cages of rain'. And then there are the visitors: a solitary man seen feeding wolves, one with 'dollybird eyes', in the ironically titled 'Dr Crippen in Love'.
'We have now reached the extreme / where tunnels and canal-bridges / lead out. Underground Railways / run on into the evening', Hill quotes from a 1928 zoo guidebook, thereby anticipating the menacing subject of his novel Underground. What makes the novel compelling is its poetic creation of a genuinely dark atmosphere, de-familiarising the banal London tube system. The vital action steps down from surface level into a gothic realm of ill-lit side tunnels alive with mice, derelict Victorian stations with mould and stalactites imparting weird beauty - and a killer on the loose pushing women under rush-hour trains. The lead character Casimir, a Polish immigrant worker, is haunted by traumatic events during his childhood, his mother's disappearance and his father's unscrupulous smuggling in Russia. He becomes involved with Alice, a homeless girl hiding out in the bowels of the underground system, and together they snatch love, attempt to stay ahead of the authorities, and are caught up in the search for the murderer.
Casimir's mother had to sell her jewels for food during the war, and ill-fated objects of desire also determine the fates of characters in The Love of Stones. This is easily Hill's most ambitious book to date; a sweeping adventure, which moves through history and across the world: between 1830s Iraq and Victorian London, and from the contemporary city to Turkey, the former Soviet states, and (once again) Japan. It follows Katherine Sterne's present day search for a legendary fifteenth century brooch with Royal connections. Told in parallel is the story of two Iraqi brothers who journey to England with a hoard of precious stones and are engaged to make crowns for the coronation of Queen Victoria. As elsewhere in his work, Hill's ability to create atmosphere, and luminous poetic details, in mellifluous phrases, is outstanding. Diamonds, for example, 'wear death invisibly, weightlessly, as if the lives of their owners were as transparent and insubstantial as air'. Katherine's frustrating search is also for love. But more memorable than the plot of twists she undergoes is the author's insights into obsession, 'like a reservoir of love gone sour'.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Faber and Faber Ltd
3 Queen Square
London WC1N 3AU
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034
E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk
http://www.faber.co.uk
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Agent
A. M. Heath & Co Ltd
6 Warwick Court
Holborn
London WC1R 5DJ
England
Tel: +44 (0) 207 242 2811
Fax: +44 (0) 207 242 2711
http://www.amheath.com
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Related links
http:/ / www.amheath.co/
http:/ / www.meettheauthor.co.uk
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