Book of the Month competition: Real Boys

We are proud to offer five copies of Real Boys by Thomas Stewart in our July Book of the Month competition, courtesy of our friends at Polygon.

To be in with a chance of winning this powerful debut from a former New Writers Awardee, all you need to do is answer the question at the bottom of the page by midnight on 31 July 2024.

All entrants must reside in the UK and full terms and conditions apply. Check out our competitions page to find more giveaways.

About Real Boys by Thomas Stewart

In his debut, Thomas Stewart examines the death of his father whilst exploring questions of grief, guilt, mental health, identity, sexuality and masculinity.

As these poems unfold a hallway of mirrors is created, with father-son relationships from art, cinema and Welsh mythology expanded and rethought. From Space Jam to The Mabinogion, The Babadook to Ivan the Terrible, this collection grapples with what it means to be a father, a son and a self.

Here, father and son yearn, kill, retreat, die, grieve, turn to stone, are brought back from the dead. Here, sunflowers compete in fashion contests, bees nestle in beards, apple seeds birth ragged robins. Here, suns give license to grief, witches rest in the crib and moths lead the way to the dead. At its core, Real Boys explores the crushing weight of grief and how we might just live with it.

Q&A with Thomas Stewart

How did you first get into writing? 

My mother’s side of the family are voracious readers, so I grew up with that influence. Books have been part of my language even before I had language. I struggled a lot with reading as a young child, but I still wanted to be near them, to try and understand, they summoned me. It took me years to read but when I did, I started writing my own stories. I took it seriously when I was 12 and began writing my first novel. I’ve been writing ever since. I struggled with poetry, though. I hated that it was deemed something you had to crack, to get, to interrogate. Poetry felt restrictive, binary, so I shunned it for many years. It wasn’t until I went to the University of South Wales and took a class in children’s poetry and learnt about the form and function of the poem that I started reading poets like Lucille Clifton and Brian Patten and Mary Oliver and poetry came alive and felt expansive. Limitless. I have been very fortunate to have had wonderful teachers and readers and supporters along the way, from my grandfather and mother, to my tutors at university, to my mentor as part of the New Writers Award, Claire Askew. Without them and without the freedom to explore and play and be with my writing, this book and my work wouldn’t exist. I’m incredibly grateful. I’m also grateful to little Tom who did a lot of work. 

What can readers expect from Real Boys?

I think readers can expect to find unvarnished grief. In addition to that, I think they will find the questions I’m asking about masculinity and identity. I was very much influenced by Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, which I read on a flight from Cardiff to Edinburgh and found myself so astonished. She was such an observer. And I wanted to do that. Observe my grief and my relationship with my father. Then came the desire to open these questions up and observe other representations of fathers and sons, death and grief. In the book, I explore this through stories in Welsh mythology, cinema and paintings. This is a book for those who are grieving and those who are yet to grieve. I hope in Real Boys, readers will find some comfort. 

How did you come to the decision to create Real Boys?

Real Boys was birthed out of my father’s cancer diagnosis and his death not soon after. I was constantly writing throughout this process. I found it to be a very real source of survival. I was writing essays, short stories and poems. Eileen Myles said that in every poetry book there is the book that didn’t survive, the poems that weren’t up to scratch or didn’t fit. I’m very much of that philosophy. So a lot of those early poems exist in the death drawer. But in their death the poems in this book were formed. With every project I am working on, I’ve discovered I’m like a bird circling the thing it’s trying to get. I don’t know what that thing is exactly. I start with a subject, though, a word that is my focus, with this collection it was ‘grief’, so the broad theme is there, but how I want to approach it, the intricacies of each poem, the way they speak to each other and open up new conversations, that is all to be discovered.