Crispin Alabaster Vale

Full name: Crispin Alabaster Vale
Born: 2012, Tunbridge Wells, Kent
Occupation: Poet, outsider artist, professional grievance container
Known for: violent adolescent confessional verse, anti-parental imagery, gay rage, bad metaphors, and calling the T. S. Eliot Prize board “a bunch of middle-aged Waitrose cunts in Boomer cardigans”
Major collection: Milk Teeth in the Lawnmower
Most famous poem: “Dad Is a Car Park”

Crispin Alabaster Vale was born in Tunbridge Wells to a family so white their Christmas photographs looked like evidence in a minor Scandinavian inheritance dispute. His father, Julian Vale, was a regional insurance manager with the emotional range of a trouser press. His mother, Antonia, taught piano, arranged dried flowers, and believed all psychological distress could be solved by “getting some air” and not making a fuss in front of neighbours.

Crispin did both, and hated them for it.

By the age of twelve, he had discovered four things: poetry, homosexuality, wanking, and the terrible fact that other people existed. This combination produced his first notebook, now held in the private collection of the Rotterdam Museum of Outsider Textual Forms under the title The Blue Spiral Pad of Malevolent Feelings. The poems were, by any reasonable technical measure, appalling. They were misspelt, overwrought, unmetered, full of broken angels, dead kitchens, screaming staircases, and repeated claims that his father had “the soul of a garden centre.”

Unfortunately, they were also unforgettable.