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Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. His books of poetry have won many awards including the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Award for Drysalter (2013) and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for Corpus (2004). His Selected Poems was published by Cape in 2016. As a librettist, his work with composers has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. The Sacrifice (for Welsh National Opera) with composer James MacMillan, won an RPS Award for Opera, and choral works Elliptics (for BBC Philharmonic) and The Anvil (for Manchester International Festival) with composer Emily Howard, were both nominated for Ivor Novello Awards. His non-fiction book Edgelands (with Paul Farley, 2011) won the Foyles Book of Ideas Award and the Jerwood Prize. He is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The poems are highly accomplished, constituting an intelligent, courageous attempt to write a contemporary religious poetry, one where God and videogames co-exist. This is very hard to do, but the voice of Soft Keys is genuinely contemporary; the best poems are lit with finely-nuanced details which the imagination can relish. A poem such as ""The Telex"" is sure, strange, beautifully judged -- Robert Crawford I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence -- Jeanette Winterson An outstanding writer * Sunday Times * Michael Symmons Roberts' poems are intense and sensual explorations of the moment when the soul quickens to some ice-cracking life. The Christian faith gives Roberts' work an iconography, a deep well of symbolism, that links him with poets like David Jones or Geoffrey Hill. Like them, his work exists to errode whatever conceals that glinting mica of truth... through language at once precise and excitingly resonant -- Adam Thorpe
