Richard Skelton - an austere and powerful novella about a fugitive in remote country in a world of dark truths and bleak, whittled beauty. It is a study of isolation and the stark facts of survival, yet it is also attentive to the brittle transience shared by all living things,

Richard Skelton, The Look Away, Corbel Stone Press, 2018.
http://richardskelton.tumblr.com/


‘I am north of where I was. Go north. That was
    the imperative. Always north. Although the why
    of it is no longer clear.’

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion.


‘As if Samuel Beckett had written The Goshawk’ - Mark Valentine



After nearly a decade of writing poetry and non-fiction, Richard Skelton has arrived at a form that is most like the music for which he is well-known: the slow accumulation of mood and atmosphere, the repetition of stark phrases, the bleak beauty, the loam and grit. In The Look Away, Skelton has written a powerful, intensely bleak, yet redemptive, novella that redraws mythic lines and repositions humanity in a more complex and ambiguous relationship with the natural world.

‘A narrative of menace and wonder’  - Julian Hyde

​The Look Away by Richard Skelton (Xylem Books) is an austere and powerful novella about a fugitive in remote country in a world of dark truths and bleak, whittled beauty. It is a study of isolation and the stark facts of survival, yet it is also attentive to the brittle transience shared by all living things, and how this gives every moment an intense significance. The writing is compelling and insistent and makes a deep impress upon the reader.
 This is Richard Skelton’s first long fiction and possesses all the haunting, mesmeric qualities of his music, poetry, film work and essays. The original limited edition sold out it in days but now The Look Away is available again in paperback. - http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.hr/2018/03/the-look-away-richard-skelton.html


Interview with Richard Skelton, June 14 2017 in Seyðisfjörður, by Tinna Guðmundsdóttir

​The Quietus | Reviews | Richard Skelton


Fifteen Questions with Richard Skelton

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