Wayne Holloway-Smith is the author of two poetry collections, Alarum (2017) and Love Minus Love (2020), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Ledbury Munte Prize for Best Second Collection. He won The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016 and The National Poetry Competition in 2018. He currently lives in London and is Editor of The Poetry Review.
‘It’s a powerful piece. Properly tunnelled into me in an intense and unforgettable way… The emphasis on love, and the way Wayne combines a symbolic iconography with real world stuff is very strong.’ Max Porter ‘I’m blown away. I don’t read Wayne Holloway-Smith’s poetry, I become immersed in its curious, skin-scraping world. In RABBITBOX he creates an atmosphere of eerie vulnerability, a ‘terrible hosanna of language’ that compels as powerfully as it unsettles. I felt the fraught mission of creating safety in a domesticity that could not guarantee it; of the magic tricks a mind must conjure when it lives alongside punishing, pathetic masculinity. An astonishing work.’ Amy Key 'This book is amazing. Imagine a poetry version of DH Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers blended with Han Kan's novella, The White Book. That could be said of Wayne Holloway-Smith's latest offering, RABBITBOX. Holloway-Smith is more than a talented poet, he's a gifted phrase-maker. RABBITBOX is a lyrically ambitious and powerfully evocative book on trauma and family. Truly a feat.' Raymond Antrobus ‘It takes a rare poet to make such magic of such brutality, but Holloway-Smith is the rarest kind: tender, curious, vivid, and wild. He bunches language like a fist, one that unravels into shadow butterflies, the idea of escape... RABBITBOX is my book of 2026.’ - Joelle Taylor 'Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles' Guardian