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David Constantine was born in 1944 in Salford, Lancashire. He read Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford, and lectured in German at Durham from 1969 to 1981 and at Oxford from 1981 to 2000. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013. He lives in Oxford and on Scilly. He has published eleven books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); Elder (2014) and Belongings (2020). His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hlderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, and his version of Hlderlin's Sophocles, combined in his new expanded Hlderlin edition, Selected Poetry (2018); and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004), his translation of Goethe's Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009), his monograph Poetry (2013) in Oxford University Press's series The Literary Agenda, and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (W.W. Norton, 2018). He has published six collections of short stories, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international fiction award. Four other short story collections, Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009), In Another Country: Selected Stories (2015) and The Dressing-Up Box (2019), and his second novel, The Life-Writer (2015), are published by Comma Press. His story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, while 'In Another Country' was adapted into 45 Years, a major film starring Tom Courtney and Charlotte Rampling.
Meet Cat (Catriona) McCabe, aspiring young sports journalist with a passion for, of all things, cycling. And now Cat, while not exactly over-endowed in the self-confidence department, has nonetheless managed to get a national newspaper to send her to cover the Tour de France. North's devoted legions of female fans, hooked by the madcap romantic adventures of her previous heroines (each gave her name as a book title: Sally, Chloe and Polly) might be forgiven for a collective sigh and a yawn at the thought of lots of men with shaved legs pedalling up hill and down dale for three weeks, but North is very clear on the attractions - and erotic potential - of such a spectacle. She does not keep the book's point of view exclusively with her young heroine. We also get to know the feelings and motivations of the other major players in Cat's Tour de France drama - the handsome, arrogant Fabian Ducasse, as much a heart-throb in the cycling world as any footballer or rock star to his fans; American Luca Jones with the team which has flown the Atlantic to challenge the French on their own soil; Ben York, the Americans' quiet and clever sports doctor. So can Cat prove herself as a journalist and keep her heart intact as she follows the 'peloton' through France and gets involved in its gripping dramas and colourful cast of characters? While readers may be forgiven for occasional exasperation at Cat's rather wet brand of self-absorbed diffidence, they will not find these inner misgiving slow down the plot: her erotic and romantic escapades hurtle along at the pace of one of the downhill stretches of the Tour. Along the way North's readers can learn more about the workings of a world-class cycle race than they perhaps ever thought they would need to know: the significance of the yellow, green and spotted jerseys, the commercial shenanigans of the corporate sponsors, the drugs, the groupies and the real reason why the cyclists shave their legs. And does the charmingly naive, impressionable but determined Cat (in literary genealogy, a sort of Bridget Jones's younger sister) find true happiness at the end of the 4000 kilometre slog? Let's just say that by this, her fourth book, North knows how to keep her readers happy. (Kirkus UK)
