Squid Squad

Half of Matthew Welton’s new book is occupied by Squid Squad: a novel, his first excursion into that genre, albeit in verse, or squared-off prose in sequence, with each section divided into four mainly four-line paragraphs with short sentences, all in the present tense. In fact, there’s no past tense in sight: the novel exists in an inviolable now. A lot of characters are in play since this is a novel of social surfaces, of picnics and bubble gum and chalk, of weather and protracted metaphors and smells. Stringed instruments. A guitar. Citrus, suppertime. Patches and wrens. The second portion of the book follows like a series of aftertremors from the earthquake (6.9 on the Richter Scale) of the first. Even more is happening than in the novel, more forms, more games, more almost-themes: laughter, evasion, a lot of colours. A clock sonnet, a framed semi-colon, an alphabet of animal expletives...

Matthew Welton was born in Nottingham in 1969. He received the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for The Book of Matthew (Carcanet, 2003), which was a Guardian Book of the Year. He was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2004. Matthew collaborates regularly with the composer Larry Goves, with whom he was awarded a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship in 2008. He is a Lecturer in Writing and Creativity at the University of Nottingham.