Gregory Warren Wilson

Photograph © Annemieke Goldswain-Hein

Gregory Warren Wilson has published six collections of poetry and a book of Fables. His seventh collection is forthcoming (Raphael Press, 2025). Warren Wilson won the Staple First Edition Award in 1996, resulting in the publication of Preserving Lemons (Staple First Edition, 1996). In the same year he also won the Tears in the Fence Pamphlet Competition. His second collection, Hanging Windchimes in a Vacuum was published by Tears in the Fence in 1997. He received an Arts Council Award for his fourth collection The Mercury Fountain (Enitharmon Press, 2008).

He has tutored for the Arvon Foundation and the Poetry School, London, and has run courses on art and poetry at the National Gallery, the Courtauld Institute, and Tate Britain.

He has been commissioned to write sequences of poems for performance with Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His libretto, Through the Mirror: Tales from Childhood, for four vocal soloists and chamber ensemble, was based on this own reworking of five of Aesop’s Fables. It has been performed and broadcast in Denmark and Sweden. His second libretto, Time’s Up King Canute, was performed in the Copenhagen Opera Festival, 2023.

His poetry has been set by Sally Beamish, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Paul Honey, Siobhan Lamb and Joseph Phibbs, and has been broadcast on Radio 3.

Available Rights

Gregory Warren Wilson

Enquire about rights

Twenty-Five Fables

The twenty-five fables gathered together here rethink the conventions of the genre. In so doing they give voice to animals as various and improbable as a goose who wants to swap legs with a giraffe, an impudent cockroach with no time for deference, and a camel so exasperated by the constraints of the genre that he ends up stalking off the page.

Two design elements are interleaved throughout: twenty-five dingbats designed by Giambattista Bodoni – devices intended to be used decoratively by printers – together with Thomas Bewick’s celebrated woodblock prints, which inspired several of these new fables.

But the characters in these fables have been given access to unprecedented realms – both geographically and metaphorically. The outcome is a collection that embraces a pair of cross-dressing vultures, an eccentric elk with a contemplative vocation, and a clutch of spoonbill eggs being incubated by a duck-billed platypus..

Genre: Illustrated Fiction / Gift Book / Children’s Fable
Dimensions: 210 x 148 mm
Original Printing: HB signed limited edition, UK only
Extent: 190 pp
Rights Available: Worldwide / HB & PB
Audience: These amusing and intelligent fables are charmingly transgressive and universally appealing. The work is exceptionally beautifully designed. As such it would make a commercially strong and highly desirable gift book.

Gregory Warren Wilson

Enquire about rights

The Snow Hare

The snow hare varies the colour of its fur according to the season - effectively camouflaging itself - bu dances with all the conspicuous exuberance for which hares have long been celebrated. The poems in this collection follow the four seasons of a year - starting and ending in winter - and the hare, whenever it appears, is the image of irrepressible energy, even in the face of death.

This collection ranges geographically from England to Australia. The birds that are at teh heart of many of these poems - crimson rosella, bower bird, honeyeater, egret, swift, wren - travel across enormous distances. They provide a thematic link, rathe like a leitmotif in a song cycle.

Collectively, these poems are an elegiac meditation on the fleetingness of experience and memory, and therefore on the transience of life itself.

Genre: Poetry
Extent: 64 pp
Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm
Rights Available: Worldwide / HB & PB
Original printing: HB signed limited edition
Audience: Warren Wilson is an award-winning poet. This book will appeal to English speaking poetry-lovers worldwide. The book has been exceptionally beautifully designed and typeset.