In May 2020 the award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson set himself the challenge of writing a Lockdown Diary in verse. The result is Plague Songs, a unique cycle of furious, bleakly comic and often offensive poems about COVID-19, fiercely inventive and desperately funny. Rowson, who recovered from the virus at the start of the year (‘sweating in freezing fits, embalmed in bed/ In sulphurous miasmata, my joints like broken walnuts,/ With hogtied eyeballs and less energy than dissipating smoke’) records in manic verse the long lockdown Summer of 2020 – coughs and sneezes, lockdown-haircuts, funerals and furloughs, hangovers and hauntings, track and trace, when Death and Pestilence were playing on the swings, or visiting the elderly in their Care Homes.

Plague Songs is also book about living in Banarnia – a nightmarish world of jingoism and xenophobia, hierarchy and inequality, government incompetence, Boris Johnson’s world-beating wet dreams, and the deadly twin viruses of stupidity and selfishness. What rhymes with COVID except bovid? Is Matt Hancock the Tory Party’s answer to Fred West? Does every shroud have a silver lining?

Author Biography

Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The New European and many other publications. His books include graphic adaptations of The Waste Land, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels and The Communist Manifesto. Among his other books are Snatches, The Dog Allusion, Fuck and Stuff (long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize), The Pen is Mightier than the Sword and The Dance of Death. Smokestack has previously published five books by Martin Rowson – Pastrami Faced Racist and the four-volume Limerickiad.

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