Dawn Watson

My debut collection We Play Here is forthcoming with Granta Books in August 2023. The book is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a backdrop of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspective of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, Watson paints an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a graceful, lyrical and evocative rendering of history through the expansive and imaginative space of a working-class girlhood.