The Fourth Sister

A The Telegraph Book of the Year Laura Scott's second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book's energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth's sense: 'an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.'

Laura Scott was born in London and now lives in Norwich. Her pamphlet, What I Saw, won the Michael Marks Prize in 2014, and in 2015 she won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her work was featured in New Poetries VII in 2018. So Many Rooms, her first collection, was The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month when it came out in August 2019 and in 2020 it won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize and the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.