Andrew McMillan on The Guardian books podcast

Andrew McMillan joined the Manchester Writing School team in September 2017.

The Guardian Book's podacast this week was dedicated to poetry, from new faces and old.

Andrew McMillan was joined by Man Booker shortlisted writer Robin Robertson, who discusses The Long Take, a postwar noir that follows Walker, a second world war veteran travelling across the US. While many describe the book as a novel, Robertson self-categorises this piece of work as a long-form narrative poem.

Our very own Andrew McMillan, winner of the Guardian’s first-book award in 2015 for his collection Physical, is back with his follow-up Playtime, which explores the ways we build our adult identities during childhood and adolescence. He discusses the connections between play and sex, and mixing autobiographical and fictional stories in his poems.

Playtime was published in August 2018. In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.

Andrew McMillan joined the Manchester Writing School team in September 2017. He was born in South Yorkshire in 1988; his debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers' award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. Most recently physical has been translated into Norwegian. 

Listen to the Podcast here.