Ahren Warner

Poetry - Winner 2012

Warner is a rising young poet whose first collection, Confer, was published in 2011 and earned Warner a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a place on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Annie Freud says of this work, “In these poems, Mozart rubs shoulders with Hesiod, Cranach with Picabia, Nietszche with Fitzgerald, Rodin with Rochegrosse. But what animates this first full collection is the constant and beguiling presence of the central character - arch-flaneur, would-be mauvais garçon, Lincolnshire small-town escapee, irreverent scholar - picking his way through these crowded streets, savouring his impressions of all that he encounters and inviting the reader to join him. Ahren Warner has almost invented a new kind of Fin de siècle.”