PRETEND YOU DON'T KNOW ME, new and selected poems

136pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Cape Town, 2019

First published in the UK in 2018.

"A witty and wise collection. Her sequence about her mother’s dementia is very touching. Elsewhere, these vital works will have you crying with laughter." Jackie Kay, The Guardian, who chose Pretend You Don't Know Me as one of her three best poetry books of 2018

Finuala Dowling was born in Cape Town in 1962. Her first collection of poems, I flying, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize; her second, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe, was a co-winner of the Sanlam prize; and her third, Notes from the Dementia Ward, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. She is the author of the novels What Poets Need, Flyleaf and Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, which won the 2012 M-Net Literary Award. She is currently senior lecturer in the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at UCT.