Selima hill biography
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00:24 Selima begins by discussing how she has always been a writer. She states that her earliest memory was when parents wanted her to go to a Roman Catholic Convent, but she wasn’t a catholic. Her father took a poem to try to convince the Reverend Mother that Selima should join and Selima recognises that this was her parents clearly encouraging her to write.
01:18 Selima states that she is only a writer in as much as she is not a painter.
01:54 She discusses what drew her to poetry, stating that as a young woman, she was quite restless and poetry seemed more ‘portable’ so she could carry her notebook with her to write little ‘snippets’ of things constantly. Selima was encouraged as a young child to read poetry. She recalls that Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter dem la Mare and Hilaire Belloc were all very familiar to her.
03:00 She discusses her experience of publishing her first poetry collection Saying Hello at the Station. At the time of publication, Selima was a ung mo
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Selima Hill
Selima Hill is perhaps best known for her surrealism. Pierre Reverdy has said of surrealism that ‘the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true […] the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’; this certainly applies to Hill’s substantial oeuvre. Deceptively anchored in the recognisable, often so-called ‘female’ worlds of domesticity, marriage, family, the poems’ deliciously bonkers juxtapositions and non-sequiturs illuminate the emotional truth at the heart of the work.
Born in Hampstead in 1945 into a family of painters, Hill read Moral Sciences at Cambridge and now lives on the Dorset coast. A prodigiously prolific poet, her first collection, Saying Hello at the Station, was published in 1984 and she has since published fifteen further collections (including two Selected Poems). The most recent is People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She was a Royal Literary Fel
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Archive Collection SH - Hill (Selima) Archive
Identity area
Title
Hill (Selima) Archive
Level of description
Extent and medium
Context area
Name of creator
Hill, Selima, 1945-, poet
(1945-)
Biographical history
Selima Hill (née Wood) was born in 1945 in Hampstead, London, into a creative family; both her parents were artists, as were her grandparents. She lived in various rural locations in England and Wales during her childhood, and went to boarding school before winning a scholarship to study Moral Sciences at New Hall College, Cambridge in 1965. After marrying in 1968 and starting a family in the 1970s, Selima published her first collection of poetry, Saying Hello at the Station, in 1984.
After winning the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1986, Selima won the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1989 for parts of her collection The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness, first published in 1988. In 1997, her collection Violet was shortlisted for thre