Siân Hughes

Hughes grew up in a small village in Cheshire, which served as the setting of her first novel Pearl.^[1]

Siân Hughes began writing poetry on an Arvon course in 1994, and in 1996 won the TLS / Poems on the Underground competition with "Secret Lives". In 2006, she won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with "The Send-Off", an elegy for her third child.^[2] In 2009, her collection of poetry, The Missing, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award shortlisted for the Felix Dennis and Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Award.^[3]

In 2023, her debut novel Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.^[3] Pearl is a retelling of the Pearl Poet's 14th century poem Pearl about grief and loss as a father struggles with the death of his daughter. The novel Pearl tells the grief experienced as the young mother Marianne loses her own mother, with the reader soon learning that the lost pearl in Marianne's recollection of grief, and her anguish, reaches yet further back to an earlier loss. Writing for The Guardian, Barney Norris commended Hughes for being able to portray the permanence of grief, stating: "Marianne is a woman whose body has kept ageing, but whose heart and mind are trapped in the moment she lost her mother. The way trauma cuts one off from the world and isolates the sufferer in the moment that hurt them is brilliantly rendered here."^[4]

Siân Hughes lives in Cheshire with her son, where she owns and runs the independent bookshop Magpie Books.^[5]

• The Missing, Salt Publishing, 2009. ISBN 9781844714988.^[6]

• Pearl, Penguin Random House, 2023. ISBN 9780593802564.^[7]