Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her debut collection, Black Country, 'a sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands' (Guardian), won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018. In The Home Child, a novel in verse, she reimagines the story of her great-aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly emigrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant schemes.