Books published by Vintage Publishing

'It all happened long time ago, no one now remembers this storylet me tell you how it all happened, how once we turned unholy.'In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth - 'the end of the world, the antipode' - to a new life in England.Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent's past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us 'see faces history can't reach', Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother's concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can't bear to acknowledge it.Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world's interconnecting threads.'And I realised I couldn't go on travelling - I had to stop my tour;that there was no El Dorado; their vast skies were also ours.Years later, in another country, I was also an interpreter who tried to render things from one world to another.When I finally wake up I'm always at a loss. Where am I?I'm back home, of course. Still, outside, the strangest sky.'

'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets'Sunday HeraldWriting out of older Scottish traditions that are ludic, intellectually deft and linguistically complex, Robert Crawford also stands with fellow poets, Liz Lochhead, Douglas Dunn and Simon Armitage as a contemporary master. Nimbly traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection featuring the traditional forms of haiku and riddle, versions of Mexican, Chinese, Old English and Greek poems, a tincture of Scots work, and many pieces that present an ageing planet dealing with twenty-first-century issues from European war to climate change and AI. These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. Mixing lyricism, play, and a sense of vulnerable interdependence, Old World draws on both Western and Eastern cultures to articulate through sound, lineation, and silence a sense of the sacredness of life on earth.

We Are Green and Trembling is a reimagining of history and the life of Antonio de Erauso, a Basque nun turned war lieutenant during the Spanish Conquista in 17th-century Argentina - a fascinating, largely forgotten figure from world history and one of South America's most famous trans men.Having left the Basque Country behind many years ago, Antonio has travelled across the Americas, reinventing himself every time. Now, Antonio is hiding deep in the jungle with two young Guaraní girls, having escaped imprisonment and a death sentence.The novel is a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny and the treatment of women and indigenous people; a queer reclamation set in the rainforest - itself a magical, surreal space for transformation.