Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems. Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains humour and humanity and the possibility of a more hopeful future to come.

Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his writing, which includes poetry, drama, prose, translation and song lyric. In 2018 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.