Philip Gross

Philip Gross (1952) is an English writer and poet. His father Juhan Karl Gross (1919-2011) was an Estonian war refugee. Gross has visited Estonia before, most recently in 2011, when he came here to teach creative writing. He is a renowned poet, demonstrated by the fact that his collection of poems The Water Table (2009), inspired by the Bristol canal, won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize. He has published around twenty collections of poetry in total, and often his work is characterised by thematic cohesion and sensitive composition. This is also palpable in his more recent works: in the book of poetry Love Songs of Carbon (2015), Gross deals with ageing, and through it the general themes of physical existence or the physicality of existence, the temporality of matter. The book was named Wales Book of the Year in 2016. The collection of poems A Bright Acoustic (2017) is a poetic study of listening, a mapping of natural as well as artificial sounds.