Description
About Michael Pedersen
Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet, writer, scribbler, stitcher.
He’s unfurled two acclaimed collections of poetry with Polygon Books and has a third (The Cat Prince & Other Poems) due with Corsair/Little Brown in summer 2023. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 in the UK & North America. He won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, the John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award, and was a finalist for the 2018 ‘Writer of the Year’ at The Herald Scottish Culture Awards. With work anthologised by the likes of Pan MacMillan and Canongate Books, Pedersen has collaborated with musicians, film-makers, and visual artists.
Pedersen also co-founded Neu! Reekie! — a prize-winning literary production house that produced cutting edge shows in Scotland and the world over for over ten years. Within this capacity he has produced and curated events with / for: Edinburgh International Festival; Edinburgh International Book Festival; Hull City of Culture; Mayor of London’s Borough of Culture; BBC Arts; and more. He also co-edited the Neu! Reekie! anthology series, published by Polygon Books, charting ten years of Neu! Reekie! through poetry and music.
His writing has appeared in the likes of: The Rialto, Ambit, The Dark Horse, Gutter, The Scotsman, Popshot, Q, The Skinny, Guardian and more.
Image credit: Hollie McNish
About The Cat Prince & Other Poems
‘Pedersen bends words like no-one else. There’s a naughtiness, an innocence and surprising vulnerability in this collection. It’s poetry to intoxicate. Just sublime.’ Juno Dawson
‘Every page of The Cat Prince brought me gladsome joy. Pedersen has the astonishing power of finding the astonishing in every moment that deserves a raised glass’ Daljit Nagra
‘This laser focused collection of poetry by Michael Pedersen will gut you like a fish and smash your heart in. Searingly specific, exquisite and requisite. I relished reading every tiny morsel of it’ Shirley Manson
‘Open-hearted, gut-wrenching and yet elegiac, these poems pack a hefty emotional punch. Michael Pedersen’s poems display a huge vocabulary for love, love in all its many forms and guises. These poems chart the journey from boyhood to manhood, the highs and the lows, the losses and the gains, always working their way towards an essential, emotional truth’ Jackie Kay
‘If the alphabet is a piano keyboard then Michael Pedersen plays it with the confidence and panache of a jazz improviser who knows that every note can have the potential to change someone’s life. Be amazed by this book’ Ian McMillan
‘Michael’s poems are so physical you can almost touch the images in them. Fabulously sensual and alive. I adore poetry like this’ Stephen Fry
The Cat Prince & Other Poems is the third collection from prize-winning poet, and author of Boy Friends, Michael Pedersen.
All moggy moxie, Pedersen croons to the beauty and devastation of love, loss, friendship, cats and careless joy. Equal parts tender and trenchant, raw and ribald, plangent and smutty, these poems exhibit an emotionally charged, fantastical playground of language and lore. From the brutalising death of a cherished friend comes a gut-wrenching grief.
And so begins a tenacious quest for light, lustre and survival as Pedersen pays tender tribute to a gorgeous, life-altering friendship. In doing so, he harks back to the hilarity of being young, reckless and petrified: memories of boys showboating in a fishing tackle shop, games of feline metamorphosis, laments for demolished buildings and a case of constipation of the most pernicious stock. As frisky as it is fierce, The Cat Prince pounces around the poet’s emotional and physical landscapes, past and present, unfankling a Scotland full of gothic splendour and nature’s majesty.
These poems reveal a poet at his bravest and most vulnerable. The Cat Prince & Other Poems purrs with affection, flashes its teeth, then digs in the claws.