Selima Hill is the only poet to have been shortlisted for this year's £30,000 Rathbones Folio prize, an award which is open to all works of literature written in English, it has been revealed. She joins six novelists and a non-fiction writer on the list for her collection Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe), which was also shortlisted for the Forward and TS Eliot prizes.

Men Who Feed Pigeons is about seven different men and their relationships with women (a companion book with the sexes reversed, Dressed and Sobbing, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2023). The Forward prize judges said last year: “The collection is by turns surreal and direct, but always arresting.  Her trademark humour is present throughout, but its wit can often surprise the reader, conveying truths in hilarious and sometimes shocking ways.  The judges were impressed by Selima's mastery of the portrait in miniature - one of the judges calling her 'the UK's Emily Dickinson'.”

Selima Hill is aged 76, and has published 20 poetry collections since 1984. She grew up in a family of painters, has lived in farms in England and Wales, and in Dorset for the past 40 years. The Forward Arts Foundation website quotes her as saying “I am only a writer in as much as I am not a painter or musician like the rest of my family. I thought writing was more cool because it was less public.” Her advice for poets starting out today is pragmatic: ‘Sweep the floor; clear the workspace; don’t have one more coffee.’

Our photograph shows Selima Hill at the Aldeburgh poetry festival at Snape Maltings in 2014.

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD