Pre-order Even the Trees.
Published 17.09.26
Shortlisted for the Forward Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2026.
Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024.
‘Intelligent, searching, and beautifully written, Roshni Gallagher’s Even the Trees is an exceptional debut collection, full of enviable phrasing and insight.’ – Karen Solie
‘These poems have a special light to them. They feel vulnerable and hard-won, like the best poems. They seem to want to sit down close with the reader and whisper these sad, honest and wonderful things that they know.’ – Niall Campbell
‘What impresses me most about this debut collection is its honouring of our humanity, the naming of ordinary people with extraordinary lives. The Kala Pani sequence epitomises this: poignant, exquisite and haunting.’ – Patience Agbabi
‘Currents of racism and colonialism persist alongside and threaten to overwhelm the wonder of the unknown, the experience of the natural world made new. A complex, assured, at times stunning debut collection.’ – Peter Mackay
“Incredible imagery and metaphors with such sparseness – the space as important as the ink.”
“Thoughtful, sad, and graceful in its strength; the lines sing.”
“carefully crafted, deeply meaningful, poems that will stay with me for a long time to come” – Edwin Morgan Poetry Award judges
“Early on, this collection leads you into finding in one river every river you’d ever touched. These poems run as gently as water, and as relentlessly. They cut with the grace and ease of a ship’s keel or sickle blade. Astonishingly both light and deep, centred and moving, these are fine lyrics of being-in-place while being-in-between.” – Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo
Roshni Gallagher 