Pretend You Don't Know Me : Bloodaxe Books Ltd : 9781780374246 : 1780374240 : 27 Sep 2018 : Pretend You Don't Know Me brings together in one volume the best of Finuala Dowling's funny, poignant and idiosyncratic poetry from four earlier prize-winning collections, with a section devoted to new poems. It introduces this popular South African poet to a UK audience. Finuala Dowling's debut collection, I flying, published in 2002, was an instant success in her native South Africa. Its accessibility, humanity and wit, as well as its beguilingly honest stories of home, parenthood, love, loss and desperation, won many new converts to poetry. The volume went into multiple printings, and won the Ingrid Jonker prize. Dowling's subsequent collections, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe and Notes from the Dementia Ward (winners of the SANLAM and Olive Schreiner prizes respectively), consolidated her reputation as an inventive sketcher of the domestic sublime. Her chapbook, Change is possible, sold out a