Charles Boyle was born in Leeds, and worked in for a long time in publishing, including fourteen years at Faber and Faber. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Affinities (1977), House of Cards (1983), Sleeping Rough (1987), The Very Man (1993; all Carcanet), Paleface (1996), and The Age of Cardboard and String (2001; both Faber), the last of which he is probably best known for. Reviewing in the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard called the book “quite beguiling: completely unpretentious yet still resonant and lyrical; linguistically precise and emotionally evasive, often at the same time.” Boyle has also published a novella, 24 for 3 (Bloomsbury, 2008) under the pseudonym Jennie Walker, and a book of photographs and brief texts, Days and Nights in W12, under the pseudonym Jack Robinson. The Manet Girl, a collection of stories, was published under his own name in 2013 by Salt Publishing. In 2007, as a result of his difficulty in getting 24 for 3 published, Boyle established CB Editions, a small press dedicated to novellas, translations, and writing in other genres often neglected by mainstream publishers.

Boyle’s poems often describe an apparently everyday sort of reality, in a city closely resembling London, yet their landscapes are disconcertingly fluid and even dream-like. The voice of these poems  – urbane, elusive, dryly humorous – retains a casual distance from the events and scenes it relays, a little like a camera making a tracking shot, while details appear within its field of view at unexpected junctures, as if we are navigating a recognisable environment along altogether strange plot-points. A highly tuned sense of irony, and a resistance to easy meaning, guides these unusual and memorable forays, following their own peculiarly apt logic, whereby a person can be identified by their disguise, and a row of parked cars is revealed to be the easiest route to the river.