The Darwin Vampires, Patrick Chapman’s fifth collection, draws on life as much as on imagination – to explore themes of memory, death, fractured love, and the often-harrowing strangeness of the world around us.

From the Pushcart Prize-nominated title poem, with its dreamlike take on the evolution of the undead, through heartbreaking elegies for lost childhood innocence, to the final, affecting sequence on mortality, The Darwin Vampires is an addictive and immersive experience that you’ll want to return to again and again.

Patrick Chapman was born in 1968 and lives in Dublin. The Darwin Vampires is his fifth collection, following Jazztown (1991), The New Pornography (Salmon Poetry, 1996), Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (Salmon Poetry, 2007) and A Shopping Mall on Mars (2008). He has also written a book of short stories, The Wow Signal (2007), an audio play, Doctor Who: Fear of the Daleks (2007); Burning the Bed (2003), an award-winning film starring Gina McKee and Aidan Gillen; and episodes of the CBeebies and RTÉ series Garth & Bev (2009/10). With Philip Casey, he founded the Irish Literary Revival website in 2006. He has been a finalist twice in the Sunday Tribune Hennessy Literary Awards, while his story ‘A Ghost’ won first prize in the Cinescape Genre Literary Competition in L.A. The title poem of The Darwin Vampires was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.