Was It for This

Chronicling the empty spaces of Sullivan's West London neighbourhood, Tenants is an exploration of how we live now - in isolation and in common. Verse, reportage and photographs create a tapestry of scenes and voices that move between moments of past and present uncertainty: flashbacks to a V2 strike; utopian plans; contemporary urban terror; post-partum anxiety; and, at the absent centre of it all, Grenfell Tower and the shame it continues to provoke. Appearing uniquely as an illustrated digital book, this extract will be followed by full book publication in 2022. An earlier version was staged in 2019 at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill. Formally ambitious, fluid and haunting, this elegiac piece is further evidence that Sullivan 'writes freshly about everything' (Observer) and 'can - it seems - do just about anything' (Poetry Review).

Hannah Sullivan lives in London with her husband and two sons, and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. Her study of modernist writing,The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy. Three Poems won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019.