Sculling by Sophie Dumont
Corsair
Shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize 2026
‘This is a book of watersheds – love, death and rivers – and once you slip into its beguiling flow, you don’t want it to end. Poised, fecund and inventive, Dumont’s poetry speaks to these times – with a visceral sense of how it is to navigate fracture, interrogate the unfathomable elements and attempt to live a joined-up life’ — Linda France
‘This is writing as sure and complex as the flow of water, weaving its wide reflections on the world, on place, on family, on natural processes and the sheer play of language, always with the steady tug of the personal story beneath’ — Philip Gross
In her unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, Sculling, poet Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club.
At the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people’s lives. His heart was donated to a young man studying in the same city as he did.
Using the kayak as a vessel to traverse life’s accumulation of losses, Sculling speaks of how this bereavement caused Dumont to reflect on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers. Here, she explores the campaign for rivers to be given personhood status for rights to protection and inspects the symbiosis of her body and the river’s.
Sculling is a powerful investigation into categories of haunting, from a body living on through donated organs, through dementia’s slow erasure, and through witnessing her niece learn object permanence – that things continue to exist when they are not visible.
In her fiercely vulnerable and meticulous debut, Dumont probes the urge to call out when under a bridge, to hear oneself ricocheted back, changed:
‘. . . a boy in a red cap opens his throat, throws sound
into shadows, as we’ve all done,
in the reckless hope of its return.’
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