Helen Dunmore: Quotes, Bibliography, and a List of Books by Author Helen Dunmore

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"A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into." -- Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore (born 12 December 1952) is a British poet, novelist and children's writer. Helen Dunmore Educated at the University of York, she now lives in Bristol.She has won awards for her fiction (the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize and the Orange Prize) and also for her poetry (she has won the Cardiff International Poetry Prize, been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and had her books named as Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations). Dunmore is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). Some of her children's books are now included in reading schemes for use in schools.

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"As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.""Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.""Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.""However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.""However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.""I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.""I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.""I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.""I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.""I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.""I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.""I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.""I was always influenced by language.""I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.""If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.""It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.""Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.""My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.""Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.""The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.""The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.""Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.""To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.""When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.""Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.""Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."