If All the World and Love Were Young

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Winner of the E. M. Forster Award Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature

Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlisted for the John Pollard Poetry Prize

A Sunday Times, New Statesman and Telegraph Book of the Year 2019

'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney

'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the greats' Sunday Times

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it.

His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.