Christopher Reid has written many books of poems, for both adults and children, and for most of the 1990s he was poetry editor at the London publishing house of Faber and Faber. Among his works are A Scattering, which addressed the loss of his first wife and was named Costa Book of the Year for 2009, and The Song of Lunch (also 2009), a narrative poem which became the screenplay for a BBC2 film starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. The actor Robert Bathurst has presented A Scattering and The Song of Lunch as a theatrical double bill, under the title Love, Loss & Chianti, most recently at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Reid’s latest publications have been Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs (2018), a canine counterblast to T. S. Eliot’s Practical Cats; The Late Sun (2020); Poems of London (2021), an anthology in Everyman’s Pocket Poets series; and Toys / Tricks / Traps (2023), a book of poems about his childhood. Letters of Ted Hughes, which he edited, appeared in 2007; The Letters of Seamus Heaney, which he also edited, followed last year.
Christopher Reid
