Released August 31st, 2025 // 26 pages // 978-1-917617-26-0 // RRP: £9.99 / $13.99 / €11.99
 
Sam Retallick’s The Winter Wizard is a folkloric sequence that blends whimsy, melancholy, and myth in an imaginative coming-of-age narrative. Set in a liminal landscape of moor, woodland, and sea, the poem conjures a dreamlike Cornwall populated by magical figures, talking bobbins, and vanished saints. Through deceptively simple language and shifting forms, Retallick explores grief, seasonal transition, and queer self-invention with a lyrical clarity that holds both humour and tenderness. The result is a strange and quietly moving mythopoeic tale shaped by place, magic, and memory.
 
PRAISE for The Winter Wizard:
I was moved and delighted by this one-of-a-kind folkloric marvel.
— Isabel Waidner
 
ABOUT Sam Retallick:
Sam Retallick was born in Cornwall, and has never left. He graduated from Falmouth University with a BA(hons) in Creative Writing. His in progress novel, Octobaby, was one of two entrants recognised as ‘highly commended’ in the Writers and Artists Working-Class-Writers’ Prize 2022. The Winter Wizard is his first book.