Ian Gouge

Ian Gouge was born on the South Coast of England where he endured a difficult childhood. By the time he went to university he had already lived in seventeen different places - houses, pre-fabs, flats, rooms of one sort or another - and all within the environs of the same two adjacent towns. No single location more than four miles from the next, between some you could have measured the distance in hundreds of yards. A number of these accommodations had been emergency refuges provided by the Local Authority to stave off familial homelessness, but in reality every one of those childhood residences proved temporary. Exactly at a time when a child needed security, the very notions of ‘home’, ‘family’ - even ‘love’ - were being challenged, their meanings redefined, shaken to their core; experiences which scarred both an upbringing and the future which followed it. Having written all through that childhood, is it any wonder that later in life he became fascinated by our relationship with our history, and how the past influences and shapes the present? In his fiction, many of his characters face such challenges of reconciliation - and in his poetry, he explores preoccupations such as what at it means to belong or to be in love.