Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and lives in Cambridge. His Carcanet collections are Several Deer (2016), which in 2017 won both the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, and The Culture of My Stuff (2020).
'Crothers' lyrical wordplay is a joy to read... subjects are too multifarious to be constrained by definition. All is driven onwards by an impeccable sense of rhythm'
Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2020
A poet of the new post-Troubles era, who, unmistakably assembled on Ulster soil, has been given a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens.
Thomas McCarthy
Linguistic pirouetting, few-pints-deep wordplay and joyful disruptions of phonetics and etymology and aphorism. A poet who wields line breaks like a matadorâs cape.
Susannah Dickey
A joybomb of wit, play, sass and Heideggerian thinginess. This book is what might happen if Paul Muldoon and Alan Gillis wrote a rap album. Buy it, bitches.
Caoilinn Hughes
'Adam Crothers's Several Deer is a pun-tastic prick-tease for any reader who likes their poems with a slice of straightforward emotional narrative...It's equal parts delightful and infuriating: a highly charged word-drunk ride across time, art and idiomatic expression.'
Chrissy Williams, Poetry London
'The poems are ingenious and sonorous and will spin your mind like a record, baby.'
Rob A. Mackenzie, Magma Poetry
'This is poetry at its most playful, sonorous and broad but also technical and intricately textured. It is poetry that compels itself forward with a terrific energy born out of appearing as though it might at any moment fall flat on its face.'
Nathan Ellis, The London Magazine
'Never was so much meaning packed into small verses; pour the oils of reading on almost anything in this collection and whole worlds mushroom. It is annoyingly impressive and, I must say, I hate this young fellow whatever club he's playing at tonight...Several Deer is such a mixture of irony and malaprop, of MacNeice splendour and Audenesque knowingness, that it will annoy as many readers as it thrills. But I'm in Crothers' fan club, I have to say, and I would never want to refute a poet like this, a poet of the new post-Troubles era, who, unmistakably assembled on Ulster soil, has been given a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens.'
Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet
'Adam Crothers' Several Deer is that rare thing, a genuinely enjoyable poetry collection. It is also, in places, very funny. His register is that of the misheard or misremembered, of "pussy rot" or "the unquiet gravy". Sources as disparate as The Sensations and Robert Herrick get mashed together into goofball sonnets and villanelles. And yet for all its wit and brio, there is great seriousness to his work. Crothers is a worthy addition to yet another nouvelle vague of brilliant young poets from Northern Ireland.'
Conor O'Callaghan
'This is a collection that shows intellectual force and ambition, its language always taut and lively and fun for the reader. Nightmare whispers, musical echoes, emotional truths, collide; the poems have each their own stance, and the book opens on an ocean of voices.'
Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin
Awards won by Adam Crothers
Winner, 2017 The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize (Several Deer)
Winner, 2017 The Shine/Strong Award
(Several Deer)
