Tom Branfoot recently won a Northern Writers’ Award for his debut collection of poetry, a work-in-progress, Volatile. The title conflates the contemporary political and chemical definitions of the word with its Middle English etymology – ‘creature that flies’, also, as a collective, ‘birds’ – accommodating an ecologically motivated examination of market volatility, the housing crisis, and social unrest. Such framing simulates the condition of the ‘polycrisis’ (Adam Tooze, Financial Times, 2022), or the global situation ‘where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part’.

Tom Branfoot's work featured in Stand Magazine comprises one contribution of poetry.