A lot of this collection comes from McGuinness’s Real Oxford(2021). While the city was emptied by the effects of the pandemic, he produced a work of non-fiction (accompanied by his own photography) that documents the parts of Oxford that largely go unseen by undergraduates. One of these is Littlemore Hospital, an asylum on the edge of the city. The prose entry for the facility would be transfigured into ‘The Wave’. The name now becomes a ‘plea’, ‘[a] name on bended knee. Increments of wanting, / and of not getting’. With all the imaginative elasticity of poetry, there comes a great deal of compassion. An anonymous patient, a ‘lady in slippers and pyjamas’, morphs into McGuinness’s own mother outside Tooting hospital, twenty years ago. Poetry and prose blur; the objective merges with the deeply personal and the local yields to the universal.

This is a deeply moving book of poems ... Shimmering with the "sweet dark syrup" of humour, and gorgeous sleights of imagery, these are poems of extraordinary grace; they come up for air with their cupped hands empty, yet brimming with light

It is a feat to write weight-bearing poems of such lightness. The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable. Kate Kellaway, Observer In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves

This is a writer worth knowing… [McGuinness] combines elegant prose with caustic commentary on romance, education and crime… most people can write for a lifetime and not produce so perfect a sentence."Lynette Roberts: Diaries, Letters and Recollections, (editor) Carcanet, 2009, ISBN 978-1-85754-856-3 Anthologie de la Poésie Symboliste et Décadente (editor) Les Belles Lettres (France), 2001 ISBN 978-2-251-44365-2 New Poetries II, an anthology, edited by Michael Schmidt, Carcanet, 1999, pp.70–76 ISBN 1-85754-349-1 You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. McGuinness's production is divided between literary criticism and fiction, memoir and poetry. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Writer's Club First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours. [1] It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. He won Wales Book of the Year a second time , in 2015, for his memoir Other People's Countries. His second novel, Throw me to the Wolves, won the Encore Award for best second novel from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a fictionalised account of the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, and the subsequent persecution and false accusations against schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies, who was McGuinness's English teacher at school in Bristol in the 1980s.