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Stepmother
  • Published: 27 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784746445
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

Stepmother

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
27 Oct 2026
EBook
2 July 2026
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Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand that most maligned of figures: the stepmother - from the put-upon parent of the blended family, to the wicked queen.

'Euripides said \"better a serpent than a stepmother.\" For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.'

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital' SARAH HALL, author of Helm
'Utterly remarkable' CAROLINE BIRD, author of The Air Year

When a new relationship casts her in the unforeseen role of stepmother to her partner’s two children, Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand this most maligned of female archetypes. Alongside her own journey, she revisits stepmothers in fairytale, film and our culture’s darkest corners of fantasy.

Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of maternal experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, STEPMOTHER radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth.

Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, STEPMOTHER has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take.

'I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently’ CLARE POLLARD, author of THE MODERN FAIRIES
  • Published: 27 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781784746445
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

About the author

Helen Mort

Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry: Division Street (2013), winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019) and a short story collection, Exire (2019). Her creative non-fiction includes A Line Above The Sky (2022), winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, and Ethel (2024). She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield.
portrait photo of Helen Mort

Also by Helen Mort

A Line Above the Sky
The Illustrated Woman
Black Car Burning
No Map Could Show Them
Division Street
See all

Praise for Stepmother

‘We’re familiar with art as an ‘act of love’ but sometimes it’s also an act of life, of living itself; a book that must be written in order to live. In this utterly remarkable collection, Helen Mort builds a home, and a skin: a shape-shifting, porous house in which the poet, and everyone she loves, might live in the fullest sense of the word’

Caroline Bird, author of THE AIR YEAR

'After becoming a stepmother herself, Helen Mort begins to question the narrative about their supposed 'wickedness'. Whether retelling fairytales or analysing contemporary porn, I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently’

Clare Pollard, author of THE MODERN FAIRIES

'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital — Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women who undertake the complicated, skillful, often powerless work of loving children. All the difficulties, privileges and rewards of remade families are in this collection; so is extraordinary sorority amid the minefields'

Sarah Hall, author of HELM