The Blink That Killed The Eye

A stunningly crafted debut short story collection, The Blink That Kills the Eye takes a poetic torch to the shadows of daily life, illuminating the characters, situations, emotions and dilemmas that pour into even the most ordinary existences.

From building sites to prison cells... from the birth of love to the last moments of breath... poet Anthony Anaxagorou expertly navigates through the tangled nets of invisibility, desperation and power to bring us time-defining tales of tragedy and hope - commenting on the irony of our shrinking capacity to really see ourselves or each other in a world increasingly defined by appearances and dangerous preconceptions.

While each story stands affectingly on its own, Anaxagorou also weaves an affecting chronology, the lives of the characters overlapping and intertwining as they develop individually.

Exploring themes of invisibility, alienation, abuse, and loss, this brave and touching short story collection shows the poet-educator at his soul-stirring best.

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts.

His second collection, After the Formalities (2019), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize, along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian Poetry Book of the Year. In 2020, he published How To Write It (Merky Books).

Anthony was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton.

In 2022 he founded Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London's Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.