Ken Smith has published fourteen books with Bloodaxe. Shed is the sequel to The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980, and houses his later collections Tera, Wormwood, The heart, the border, Tender to the Queen of Spain and Wild Root (Poetry Book Society Choice) together with new poems. Smith has written books on Berlin and on his on time as writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison. He received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1997, and a Cholmondeley Award in 1998. Born and bred in Yorkshire, he has lived in London for the past twenty years.

About Shed:

"Smith's writing exists in permanent disagreement with English fashion. He gives at least as much emphasis to speech as to image, often essaying an eloquent bareness that links his work with ballads and anonymous song. A huge cast of overheard characters, wanderers, losers and remembrancers passes through his writing, bound by a common sense of loss and endurance...One of the signs of an important poet is that he or she leaves with an expanded sense of imaginative possiblity."
—Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times

"His poems are squeezed out from under the unrelenting pressures of history, politics and the natural elements...some of his poems read like translations from war-ravaged Eastern Europe"
—Charles Boyle, London Magazine