Longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2026
History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book’s themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, informed by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space. Foreboding, magic, history and humour all play their part in this.
The first of its four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world.
The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. It introduces an ‘alternative girl child self’, inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove’s dream of such a girl (‘my death, and she is my soul’), and by a friend’s fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history.
Drawing inspiration from Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘potentive space’ – where play, fantasy and reality intersect – Penelope Shuttle's History of the Child seeks to articulate the essence of ‘being’ through fiery language and elemental imagery.
'Shuttle’s style is both spare and vivid: the lines are often short, the language accessible [...] Shuttle’s language often evokes shades of the folkloric, referencing myth, fable and pagan history. The titular child is a faerie child, more mischievous, shape-shifting and malevolent than sweet and charming, more Grimm’s fairy tales than bedtime-cosy [...] Shuttle leaves us with a mercurial being, and a mercurial collection, best read, in my experience at least, in a sort of ‘eyes half-shut’ way, where meaning and connection are left to find their own shape in the reader’s mind.' – Diana Cant, The Alchemy Spoon, on History of the Child
'Playful, mercurial, and poignant, Shuttle’s collection understands childhood as the first country of poetry, where language enchants, deceives, and saves us by turns.' – Ali Choudhary, Newcastle Poetry Festival blog, on History of the Child
‘The capacious and playful latest from Shuttle (Lyonesse) offers twin poles of memory and imagination, taking place in part among the scenes, recollections, and visions of childhood […] She captures the blending of love and loss, of personal grief and environmental anxiety, that comes with growing up […] Quietly witty and slyly allusive, this dispenses poignant reflections on the poet’s personal history.’ – Publishers Weekly, on History of the Child
Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove, and has a grown-up daughter Zoe, who works in the field of sustainable energy.
Her first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs (1981) was followed by six other books from Oxford University Press, The Child-Stealer (1983), The Lion from Rio (1986), Adventures with My Horse (1988), Taxing the Rain (1994), Building a City for Jamie (1996) and Selected Poems 1980-1996 (1998), and then A Leaf Out of His Book (1999) from Oxford Poets/Carcanet, and Redgrove’s Wife (2006) and Sandgrain and Hourglass (2010) from Bloodaxe Books. Redgrove’s Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Sandgrain and Hourglass is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), drew on ten collections published over three decades plus the title-collection, Unsent. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Will you walk a little faster? (2017), her double collection Lyonesse (2021), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022, and History of the Child (2026), longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2026. Heath, a collaboration about Hounslow Heath with John Greening, was published by Nine Arches in 2016.
First published as a novelist, her fiction includes All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) and Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1977).
With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) and Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995), as well as a collection of poems, The Hermaphrodite Album (1973), and two novels, The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976).
Shuttle’s work is widely anthologised and can be heard on The Poetry Archive Website. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and her poem ‘Outgrown’ was used recently in a radio and television commercial. She has been a judge for many poetry competitions, is a Hawthornden Fellow, and a tutor for the Poetry School. She is current Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group, one of the longest-running poetry workshops in the country.
