Steve Nash is a writer, performer and musician, born in Yorkshire and raised on army barracks across the UK and Europe.

A widely and internationally published poet, in 2014 Steve won the Saboteur Award for  ‘Best Spoken Word Performer’  from a shortlist that included  Kate Tempest and Hollie McNish.

Steve was awarded a Ph.D  in literature studies  from Leeds University.  He currently works as a Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Derby.

You can find out more about Steve at www.stevenashwrites.com

Praise for Nearly Man

‘Brave, exhilarating, darkly comic – this is Steve Nash’s best collection yet.’ – Helen Mort

‘To read Steve Nash’s Nearly Man, is to find oneself experiencing a state of liminality, a place of  thresholds, never quite in one place or another. Nash mixes humour and poignancy, and an attention to craft that elevates the poems from the flat background of the page, especially where the concrete form is concerned, when poems become more than just words, existing in the space between poetry and visual art. I was deeply moved by this collection, and found myself constantly surprised by it. I will return to it.’  – Wendy Pratt,

‘Readers of Nash’s work will find all the old imaginative wit and gothic quirkiness here but also a new vulnerability. Poems that deal with the strange, the shadowy and the half-sensed, yet in their tenderness and honesty are entirely relatable.’ – Charlotte Wetton

‘Nearly Man is both hilarious and devastating. With startling precision, Nash weaves a many-layered tapestry, charting a complex relationship between mother and son as she nears the end of her life, alongside the son’s quest for belonging and self-acceptance. Yet, Nash never loses his humour. From feral children in IKEA to the ‘sexy indifference of rot’, Nearly Man offsets the painful ‘blistered wing of morning’ with an indomitable playfulness.’ – Joanna Nissel

 ‘All shadows are almost”, Steve Nash writes in his poem ‘Morning Before’, and the poems in Nearly Man leave you with just this sort of ache – a barely-beyond-reach, seen-from-the-corner-of-your-eye sensation. Haunting, witty, inventive, and sincere, this new collection leads us through the strangest of places, and bits of those places will stay with you long after the last lines are read.’ – Kate Garrett

 ‘This collection bites deep, then offers a balmy antidote to the sting. With mastery and surgical precision, Nash manipulates gaps in memory/between words to allow glimpses of worlds/visions/tricks of light. A zoetrope of creative construction – elegant and mechanical – Nash steers us to meet mortality square on. This collection is quick and clever, dreamy and dark.’ – Lorna Faye Dunsire

Praise for Myth Gatherers

Steve Nash’s poems are addresses, interventions, quest ions, complaints, agreements, ruminations, conclusions…  concerning stories that have been long forgotten, or not yet invented. The ease and audacity with which he speaks in figures lets him take hold of all the scattered materials that present themselves and re-write them into a larger scale of experience.
‘With a single laugh like a thunderclap
you shape your mouth to a hollow, howl your new name,
and a crow flies out, skittering into the wind.’
– Peter Riley

Steve Nash’s poems are desire paths, inviting us to find our own way through the rich, surreal, tender landscape he invokes, a world where silences are coloured in pencil, valleys brim with ‘intoxicating uncertainty’ and darkness is a benediction. From a Dear John letter to Leeds ring road to lyrical incantations and hymns to ghost stations, these poems enchant and enthral.
– Helen Mort

Desire Path

Unpick your native words.
Let them fall over the moor.
Angle a square of vellum
against the landscape
and trace your language.

Pick up your plot and go
out into the valley.
Walk your path,
keeping close to the
tumble of your words.

Listen for the shadowpulse
of animal, wildflower,
happenstance.
Gather their metaphors
and alien rhymes.

Take not a map but a metre
and let the drummer’s
arms ride loose.
Walk without knowing. Leave
your old words to seed.

Myth Gatherers, Steve Nash, £8.70 (inc. UK p&p)