Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. Her collection Violet (1997) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK's major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe Books include People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Selima Hill was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022, made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.

'... by turns surreal, witty and touching is Selima Hill's tomely A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, which, at 270 pages, has the feel of a Collected, but in Hill's trademark refusal of convention, it is a book full of kaleidoscopic miniatures. Three poems often share one page where voices of animals, objects and shared lives intertwine: there is enormous fun in Hill's writing [...] in their brevity these poems possess an oddly snowballing effect, where narratives fuse with one another. [...] This book marks Hill as a poet of boundless reinvention.' - Mícheál McCann, The Irish Times

'Selima Hill's A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus is wickedly funny and strange in the best way. This collection is as sharp as it is understated, transforming everyday life into a cartography of intimacy and fracture. Domestic detail collides with surreal images that feel truer than realism. Her poems expose family rifts, faith and gendered power dynamics with biting wit in deceptively simple snapshots. The book is bold, relatable and unforgettable: a sly masterpiece of the ordinary made uncanny.' - Anzal Omar, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

'A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus is divided into ten sections. Each section, or sequence, reads like a short story, a long short story, often in very short poems of just two or three lines. The book is witty, acerbic, sad, tender, philosophical, beautifully observed, and is another groundbreaking work by an important poet at the top of her game, always pushing the envelope of possibility.' - The Scotsman Magazine (Poem of the Week)

'The miniaturism of Martial and Emily Dickinson is reinvented in this iridescent collection which brings together 11 sequences whose subjects range from girls misbehaving in convent schools to fridges contemplating death, plus a pair of bad-tempered sisters, a parrot and hair clips... Over 254 pages, Hill creates a new kind of narrative poem, which has all the rewards of reading a good novel - or novels - yet she retains poetry's unique ability to zoom in on minutiae, as when contemplating ants whizzing about like bumper cars...' - Philip Terry, The Guardian (The best recent poetry) on Women in Comfortable Shoes

'Her poems resist analysis. Short, precise and startling, funny in both senses, they make everything else look like pretentious waffle... Hill is especially good at capturing young girls' voices, a strength of the early sequences here, in a book that charts a kind of Seven Ages of Woman ... Selima Hill is a great poet.' - Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month), on Women in Comfortable Shoes

'This is the twenty-first poetry collection from the unstoppable Selima Hill. These days she tends to present her work as sequences of small poems, some extremely minimal. Women in Comfortable Shoes consists of eleven such sequences. Their power lies not so much in the individual poems as in the cumulative, immersive effect of each sequence, and in Hill's charismatic voice which seizes attention from the get-go ... I seem to see the world more vividly and sense it more intensely after reading Selima Hill, and this highly readable collection is no exception. She shakes things up and wakes up your mind like no other poet. She'd probably hate to hear me saying this but - genius!' - Annie Fisher, The Friday Poem