This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. I also completed two novels fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel.ĭuring this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.Īt around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Poetry was very important to me from childhood. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. In a large family you hear a great many stories. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. ' Steeped in myth and legend, and full of the resonance of the deeps, this immersive five-book saga shows leading poet and author Helen Dunmore at her lyrical best. And she's sure she can hear him singing across the 'I wish I was away in Ingo, far across the briny sea. But Sapphy doesn't just crave the wild world beneath the waves she also longs to see her father once more. Diving down into Ingo, she discovers an intoxicating world she never knew existed, where she must let go of the airy world above, and embrace the sea.

Then, the following summer, Sapphy meets Faro – an enigmatic Mer boy. When he is lost at sea she can't help but think of the old myth. Sapphire's father told her that story when she was little. He swam down into the sea to be with her, and was never seen again. Readers will be drawn into a watery world of mystery and magic by this haunting, sea-drenched series set on the coast of Cornwall… Once there was a man who fell in love with a mermaid. Award-winning author Helen Dunmore’s INGO saga, a beautiful mermaid series for readers of 9 and up, now available in an unmissable ebook collection containing all five novels.

Stormswept helen dunmore