Product Description
Black Car Burning
Author: Helen Mort
Format: Paperback
Dylan Thomas Prize 2020
The debut novel from the brilliant and award-winning poet Helen Mort
Alexa is a police community support officer whose world feels unstable.
Caron, Alexa's girlfriend, is pushing her away and pushing herself even harder. A climber, she fixates on a brutal route. Leigh, who works at a local gear shop, watches Caron climb and feels complicit.
Meanwhile, an ex-police officer compulsively revisits the April day in 1989 that changed his life forever. Trapped in his memories of the disaster, he tracks the Hillsborough inquests, questioning everything.
As the young women negotiate Sheffield's violent inheritance, the rock faces of Stanage and their relationships with each other, Mort stunningly grounds these journeys of trust and trauma, fear and falling, in the texture of the urban and natural terrain underfoot.
'A beautifully accomplished debut...a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing' — Guardian
'Helen Mort is unmistakably one of the most brilliant poets of her generation; Black Car Burning shows her to be a remarkable novelist' — Robert Macfarlane
About the Author
Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry: Division Street (2013), winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019) and a short story collection, Exire (2019). Her creative non-fiction includes A Line Above The Sky (2022), winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, and Ethel (2024). She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield.
For custom orders and quotes: shop@schoolspace.co.za
© 2026 Schoolspace. This product description is the exclusive intellectual property of the publisher, protected under copyright law. Unauthorized use, adaption, or copying is strictly prohibited.
