Scout Bolton

I have a long history in poetry, having now written four full-length poetry collections that found publishers: Softcore Cloudstep was published by 79Rat Press in 2012, a small print run sold almost exclusively in a bookshop in Oxford. Then came Wild Heather, published in 2017, by Civil Coping Mechanisms, an American publisher who brought my work to a wider audience and therefore gave me some critical acclaim. My third book, A Terrific Uproar, was written in a sort of manic, semi-delusional, three-month long flow state, it's about an obsession I got during the pandemic with the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, along with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Most recently, I wrote The Mad Art of Doing Time, released this year, about my experience in prison, from prison; I mostly wrote it in a notebook given to me by the prison chaplain. I should explain: I have schizoaffective disorder and was not being managed well in the community (to say the least), and in a complete state of delusion thinking I was in the biopic of my own life, I wandered into a shop with a toy gun to "film the action sequence" - in reality this was pointing the gun at the till and screaming at the cashier for money. I carry this guilt with me, but I've wanted to turn it into something good. In 2024, in partnership with the Prison Radio Association, we made a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about this and my struggles with addiction: 'The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag', all told through a hazy lens of recollection