From the phenomenally bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time comes Mark Haddon's first collection of poems.

That Mark Haddon's first book after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a book of poetry may surprise his many fans; that it is also one of such virtuosity and range will not.

The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea reveals a poet of great versatility and formal talent. All the gifts so admired in Haddon's prose are in strong evidence here - the humanity, the dark humour, and the uncanny ventriloquism - but Haddon is also a writer of considerable seriousness, lyric power, and surreal invention. This book will consolidate his reputation as one of the most imaginative writers in contemporary literature.

Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. He studied for a BA in English at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1981.

Mark has packed a lot into his career over the years since graduating, with a spell working as a live-in volunteer for someone with MS to working a string of part-time jobs in London, from theatre box office to bicycle mail order work.

Between 1983-4 Mark returned to studying to complete an MSc in English Literature at Edinburgh University. Following this Mark held part-time positions for Mencap and several other organisations, working with children and adults with a variety of mental and physical handicaps.

At this time he was also involved in illustration work for a number of magazines and has been a cartoonist for the New Statesman, Spectator, Private Eye, Sunday Telegraph and Guardian for which he co-wrote a cartoon-strip, Men - A User's Guide.

After a year living in Boston, Massachusetts (1997-1998) with his wife they moved back to England and, dissatisfied with his illustration work because it was causing him headaches, he took up abstract painting, which he now regularly sells.

From 1996 until now, Mark has been involved with many television projects. He has won numerous awards, including two BAFTAs and The Royal Television Society Best Children's Drama for Microsoap for which he was the creator and writer of 12 out of 25 episodes.

He has also written 2 episodes for the children's TV series Starstreet and most recently, has been involved in a BBC screenplay adaptation of Raymond Briggs's, Fungus and the Bogeyman.

All this still doesn't make mention of Mark's increasingly successful career as an author, with his first children's picture book, Gilbert's Gobstopper published in 1987 by Hamish Hamilton.

Since then he has gone on to write and illustrate numerous children's books including the popular Agent Z series for Bodley Head, of which Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars was dramatised on BBC 1 in 1996. In 1994 Mark was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize for The Real Porky Philips published by A & C Black.

Mark Haddon is the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and a Commonwealth Writers' Award for Best First Book in 2003, and has over 200,000 copies in print in Canada alone.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is the often amusing and compelling story of Christopher, a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome. Shown through his unwavering eyes, his family and relationships come under sharp scrutiny in this unforgettable novel.

Mark now lives in Oxford with his wife, Sos Eltis, who is a fellow in English Literature at Brasenose College and their son Alfie. In his spare time, although it's amazing to think that he might have some, Mark does marathon canoeing and as he puts it, 'various other masochistic sports activities'.