Red House

In Red House, her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry. Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in Red House proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.



Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex. Between 1995 and 2000 she worked for the British Council in Russia, where she set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre. She currently works as a translator and consultant for the Royal Court and other theatre companies. Many of her translations have been staged, one of which, Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and, with Carcanet, three collections of her own poetry, Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007) and Red House (2011). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award.