Zonal

Don Paterson's new collection of poetry starts from the premise that the crisis of mid-life may be a permanent state of mind. Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life. Narrative and dramatic in approach, genre-hopping from horror to Black Mirror-style sci-fi, 'weird tale' to metaphysical fantasy, these poems change voices constantly in an attempt to get at the truth by alternate means. Occupying the shadowlands between confession and invention, Zonal takes us to places and spaces that feel endlessly surprising, uncanny and limitless.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. His following collection, God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Don Paterson's poetry collection, Landing Light, won the 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award, and also received the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize - making him the first poet to have won the award twice. His latest poetry collection, 40 Sonnets, has been shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year award. He works as a musician and editor, teaches at the University of St Andrews, and lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.