David Constantine is an award-winning short story writer, poet and translator. His collections of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. He is also author of one novel, Davies, as well as Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. He has published four collections of short stories in the UK, including Back at the Spike, Under the Dam, The Shieling and the winner of the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award, Tea at the Midland and Other Stories. He lives in Oxford, where until 2012 he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

DEAD LETTER OFFICE

An Island

By DAVID CONSTANTINE

“I’m as well off here as anywhere. Wherever I was, there’d still be the want of you.”