Winner of a Forward Prize for Poetry: Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 

Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry 2020

In RENDANG, Will Harris complicates and experiments with the lyric in a way that urges it forward. With an unflinching yet generous eye, RENDANG is a collection that engages equally with the pain and promise of self-perception. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages; they sit next to us on the bus, walk with us through the crowd and talk to us while we’re chopping shallots. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don’t look at and why.

Playing eruditely with and querying structures of narrative, with his use of the long poem, images, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

A playful and insightful exploration of contemporary notions of self and society. — Best Books of 2020, Guardian

Stand out among debuts is RENDANG. — Best Books of 2020, Financial Times

A rising star of the British poetry scene, Will Harris explores identity, race and the language we use to articulate our experiences of being in the world. RENDANG is Harris’ first full-length collection and is a heartfelt reflection of how it feels to fall between different cultures, languages and places. — Best Books of 2020, i-D Magazine

Will Harris’s RENDANG is a sharp and assured debut collection that meditates on the multiplicity of identity, the shaky building blocks that make up a country and the politics of exhibition. It travels from actual terrains in London, Chicago, Jakarta to the surreal “purple rock” of “Planet Mongo”, and this exploratory curiosity is matched by the collection’s formal expansiveness, encompassing accomplished prose-poems, concrete poetry and lyric sequences. Harris suffuses the everyday with a mythic dignity, so that the drunk singing Otis Redding in a pub takes on the tragic stature of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner . . . The collection leans into a vocabulary all of its own, and announces itself as an artefact that will not be dislodged. — Guardian

Moving portraits of everyday grace . . . RENDANG develops the blend of wit and eloquence that [Harris] showcased in his 2018 essay Mixed-Race Superman . . . The poems in RENDANG span the formal range of a mature poet but it’s Harris’s playfulness that really impresses. He has the confidence and stylistic mastery to jump between dreams and scenes like a character in a video game . . . If verse is a tightrope, Harris skips along it. — Financial Times

The subtlest [and] most ambitious book out this month. — Telegraph

RENDANG makes a new aesthetic of confused talk about history and identity in England now. These lateral, witty poems often start like short stories, as Harris draws us into vignettes of vulnerable self-observation. But they end with the aphoristic force of pop songs, where emotion is suddenly pinned, tremulously, in an image or rhyme . . . It’s the debut of the year so far. — Sunday Times