The Look Away

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion. After nearly a decade of writing poetry and non-fiction, Richard Skelton has arrived at a form that is most like the music for which he is well-known: the slow accumulation of mood and atmosphere, the repetition of stark phrases, the bleak beauty, the loam and grit. In The Look Away, Skelton has written a powerful, intensely bleak, yet redemptive, novella that redraws mythic lines and repositions humanity in a more complex and ambiguous relationship with the natural world.

About the Author

Richard Skelton is an artist, musician and writer from Lancashire in northern England. His work is informed by landscape, evolving from sustained immersion in specific environments and deep, wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, ecology and geology, folklore and myth. Between 2005 and 2011, he ran his own acclaimed Sustain-Release Private Press, publishing music under such names as A Broken Consort, Clouwbeck and Heidika. He currently runs Corbel Stone Press with his wife, the Canadian poet, Autumn Richardson.

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