Don Paterson – Toy Fights

We're over the moon to be hosting the launch event for Don Paterson's upcoming and long-awaited memoir, Toy Fights: A Boyhood. Don will be in conversation with poet and academic Rosa Campbell.

This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.

In-person vouchers can be redeemed on the night of the event against a single copy of the featured book – we will have a list of attendees with vouchers to be redeemed. Please note that only one voucher can be redeemed per book. Livestream vouchers are valid until the day after the event and can be redeemed on the website against the price of Toy Fights.

About Toy Fights:

This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing estate.

When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys' Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London - did, for better or worse, shape who he would become. Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes and, on two occasions, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and, for over twenty-five years, was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. He also works as a jazz musician.

Rosa Campbell is an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews, specialising in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, especially by women and queer writers. She is also a writer; her poetry has appeared in various places, including Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Perverse, Ambit, Gutter and SPAM, and her first book, Pothos—a (sort-of) memoir about grief and houseplants—was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.