DAVID HARSENT is a well known poet and successful writer of thrillers (as Jack Curtis) and for television and film. 

     He has written several libretti for operas, notably Gawain in collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle which was premiered at the Royal Opera House.  His poetry has been widely anthologised and several volumes of his poems, including Mr Punch have been published by Oxford University Press.  He has received the Geoffrey Faber Award and the Cheltenham Festival Prize. His most recent collection, A Bird's Idea of Flight was published by Faber (1998 ).His novel From An Inland Sea was published by Viking/ Penguin.

     His electric version of Goran Simic's poems written during the siege were published by Cargo Press as The Sorrow of Sarajevo. 

THE SORROW OF SARAJEVO

Goran Simic and David Harsent, Limited edition 250 copies. (Only a few copies left.) ISBN 1 899980 01 6 paper £6.00  254 x 160 24 pp
Images by Robert McNab

David Harsent's vivid English rendering of Simic's haunting siege poems. Eight poems written during the siege of Sarajevo, sometimes beautiful, often harrowing, an impressive witness to horrific events. Two of the poems formed part of the libretto for Nigel Osborne's opera, Sarajevo, which had its premiere at the Royal Festival Hall, London in1994.

       'The National Library burned for three days last August
                and the city was choked with black snow.

        Set free from the stack, characters wandered the streets,
                mingling with passers-by and the souls of dead soldiers.
    
        I saw Werther sitting on the ruined graveyard fence; I saw                Quasimodo swinging one-handed from a minaret.'
                                                          Lament for Vijecnica


         'Sarajevo, January, 1993.
         My friend put his wife and children on the bus
         to God-knows-where,
         and wrote on the frozen window, I am with you.
         After that moment he wrote no more ...'
                                                           A Common Story

Essays, poems, & reflections on Ian Hamilton.
Editor: David Harsent. Limited Edition. ISBN 1 899980 06 7, hardback special discount price: £18.50, (reduced from £25.00) 240x160. 160 pp

The result is an unrivalled portrait of literary London for the last thirty years, a Who's Who? of Britain's best poets, novelists, and playwrights resulting in a unique document filled with wit and humour: a fine catalogue of literary triumphs and feuds. . . a must.

CONTRIBUTORS:  A Alvarez, Julian Barnes, Peter Dale, Douglas Dunn, Colin Falck, Michael Fried, John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson,  Clive James, Alan Jenkins, Ian McEwan, Karl Miller, Blake Morrison, Andrew Motion, Charles Osborne, Harold Pinter, Peter Porter, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Hugo Williams.

'Ian was the Gaffer, someone whose presence and example makes you write as well as you are able.' Julian Barnes.

'Ian has shown us a way forward from our crisis with a poetry not of posturing or verbal cleverness, but of a quiet and reverential humility before the real.'   Colin Falck.

'What he managed, probably without meaning to, was to create a milieu. Writers gathered around The New Review because they respected his ideas of quality.' Ian McEwan.

'I read his poems at various public gatherings and was struck always by the audience's stilled response to a poetry which was at one and the same time so delicate and so full of sinew.'  Harold Pinter .