I did not know Tobias Hill well, but I knew him a little, enough to remember his friendliness, his sharpness, and his sense of literary adventure.
When his first novel, Underground (Hill, 1999), came out, I interviewed him for The Times. He led me to the entrance of a disused Underground station near Kentish Town, close to where he lived. We were both young; he in his late twenties, me early thirties. Tobias already seemed one of the most gifted literary voices of his generation, a prize winning poet, short story writer and now, with Underground, a novelist: a writer of unusual range and seriousness.
The decommissioned station entrance was sealed off. But unofficially, it had acquired another life. There were signs, unmistakable, that it was being used, intermittently, as a kind of improvised brothel. Not in any organised sense. More in that half-abandoned London way, where gaps in the system become temporary economies. When a door to the corner of the station opened, we encountered a heavily made-up woman, the strong smell of cheap perfume and air freshener, and a ‘massage’ table in a rather damp, bleak room. You didn’t need to be told what the space was being used for. The woman looked at us hopefully and suspiciously. She didn’t speak English.
Tobias was fascinated and amused, but not in a lurid way. In a writer’s way. He wanted to get closer, to inspect the entrance, to see how it had been sealed, what might still be accessible. I remember a moment where he half-suggested we try to peer in further, and I remember thinking, this is exactly what his writing does. It edges towards the hidden, the marginal, the slightly dangerous threshold.
We didn’t go in, but politely declined the woman’s other invitations. It was a poignant moment, full of a sense of pathos.
So we never stepped into the abandoned underground that Tobias wrote so magnificently about.
It now strikes me as an inadvertent metaphor for a life and career whose further flourishing was cruelly interrupted by illness. Hill suffered a stroke in 2014 which ended his fiction and poetry writing, and he died in 2023, aged 53 (Shamsie, 2023).
The publication of Collected Poems gives us a chance to see the full shape of that achievement (Salt, 2026). His publisher Salt describes Hill’s poetry as an “urban pastoral”, and that phrase is exactly right. His poems are full of cities, tunnels, gantries, embankments, stairwells, birds, rust, weather, markets, mud, trains and animal life. He was not a pastoral poet in the conventional sense. He found the wild inside the manufactured world, and the human inside systems that might otherwise seem mechanical or brutal.
1. He taught me that mystery lives inside the specific
What strikes me most in Hill is his refusal of vagueness. He gets to mystery through precision. Kamila Shamsie’s obituary says he was “intrigued by what lay beneath the surface of things” (Shamsie, 2023), and gives the marvellous example of Hill buying an antique watch in Kraków, then following the historical unease lodged inside that object into The Love of Stones (Hill, 2001). That anecdote feels central to his whole method. A watch, a jewel, a station, a cat, a market, a staircase, a patch of mud, these are never just things in Hill. They are pressure points where history, violence, beauty and obsession meet.
This is why his poems feel haunted without ever becoming fuzzy. In “The Nightworkers”, the railwaymen are concrete, physical, located, their boots tread the stones into “ruts” (Hill, n.d.a), the line is under repair, the gantries are lit. Yet out of this exact scene comes an almost mythic unease. The men become figures out of dream or folklore, “bogeymen” (Hill, n.d.a), but only because Hill has first made the world tactile and particular.
As a writer, I learn from this that the route to significance is not abstraction first. It is attention first. Hill does not decorate an idea with imagery. He discovers the idea by staying with the object, the place, the texture, the bodily sensation. That is one reason his fiction and poetry are so full of secrecy, revelation and obsession. The hidden is already in the seen.
2. He loved the underground, literally and imaginatively
Hill’s fascination with underground spaces was not incidental. His first novel, the aforementioned Underground (Hill, 1999), is set in the Tube’s passages, tunnels and derelict stations, following Casimir, a Polish immigrant drawn into both a contemporary search and the buried terrors of his past. Even later summaries of his work return to the way subterranean movement becomes psychological excavation (Shamsie, 2023).
That love of underground life extends beyond the novel. In the Tate audio, Hill is introduced as reading poems from Zoo (Hill, 1998) and Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (Hill, 2006) that explore Camden’s flora and fauna (Tate, n.d.), which is such a Hill phrase, because it suggests that the city itself is alive, layered, ecological, animal.
His London is not merely a backdrop. It is a metabolism. In the 2014 Guardian interview, Hill says he had been “trying not to write about London for years” (Patterson, 2014), yet book after book returns there, from Underground (Hill, 1999) to What Was Promised (Hill, 2014), and his poetry collection Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow is described as a love song to the city (Crown, 2006). That doubleness is crucial. The underground is never just transport, it is psychic infrastructure, historical storage, the unconscious of the city.
This is where a Deleuzian reading becomes illuminating. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are interested in flows, assemblages, thresholds, movements, becomings rather than fixed identities (Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi, 2013). Hill’s London works like that. It is a field of collisions, a set of intensities. Characters do not stand outside the city and observe it. They are altered by passing through it. They become legible, or illegible, inside its networks. Hill’s underground is not just below the city. It is one of the places where becoming happens.
3. He had a distinctive humanity
One of the loveliest things about the recent Salt page for Collected Poems is the cluster of praise it assembles: A. S. Byatt saying, “There is no other voice today quite like this”, Rachel Cusk calling the writing “compassionate and intelligent”, and Adam Mars Jones praising its conjurations of place (Salt, 2026). Those responses matter because they identify something larger than style. Hill’s writing is not coldly brilliant. It is brilliant and humane.
Even when he writes about obsession, terror, secrecy or violence, he does not write with contempt for people. Shamsie’s obituary emphasises his attention to “the sorrows and violence of history” (Shamsie, 2023); her review of The Hidden stresses that Hill’s real subject is extremism itself, not a simplistic clash of civilisations (Shamsie, 2009). He is interested in how people are drawn, damaged, tempted, estranged. That is a morally serious imagination, but not a self-righteous one.
You can feel this humanity in the poems as well. “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat” could easily have become a clever historical exercise, but Hill turns it into something sadder and stranger (Hill, n.d.b). The lighthouse keeper is implicated in destruction, but the poem does not flatten him into villainy. Instead, the poem keeps opening a space where care, blindness, violence and wonder coexist. Likewise, “Drunk Autumn Midnight Below Victoria Embankment” is grubby, tired, urban, half lost, but deeply tender (Hill, n.d.c).
This is one reason I think Hill still matters. He wrote with exactness, but never with hardness. He could make a city feel sensuous and wounded at the same time. He could render atmosphere without sacrificing ethics. That distinctive humanity is part of why the silencing of his voice feels, as Jeremy Wikeley writes, like a measure of “how much we lost” (Salt, 2026) because of “the leap in quality in the later poems”.
4. He made the metaphorical out of the specific
Hill’s gift for metaphor is not ornamental. It grows organically from situation. In “The Nightworkers”, repair work on a railway line becomes a meditation on labour, silence, suspension and the strange dignity of maintenance. “Nothing comes” while the men work (Hill, n.d.a), which is true at the level of the scene, but also hints at a temporary break in the whole system.
In “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat”, the spiral stair, the lamp, the gifts brought at night, all of this is literal, yet it also becomes an allegory of belated knowledge. The keeper does not know “what he had done” until too late (Hill, n.d.b).
His novels work similarly. The Love of Stones (Hill, 2001) turns gem history into a meditation on desire and diaspora. The Hidden (Hill, 2009) uses archaeology as a metaphorical setting for extremism. In Hill, the metaphorical is never laid on top. It is released from within the material itself.
5. He mined the unconscious, but kept faith with joy
There is a darkness in Hill, certainly. But I do not think he was simply a poet of gloom. There is also appetite, wit, beauty, collision, sensuality, even delight. Salt describes the poems as “haunting, but filled with charm and wit” (Salt, 2026); the Tate audio points to Camden’s living ecology (Tate, n.d.); Sarah Crown stresses the “ragged beauty” that Hill pulled out of London (Crown, 2006).
A Spinozist frame helps here. In Ethics, Spinoza suggests that joy is linked to an increase in our capacity to act and connect (Spinoza, 2005; Nadler, 2009). Hill’s writing often inhabits sadness, but it keeps searching for heightened relation, for turning sadness (which for Spinoza was a diminution of power) into an increase of power (what Spinoza termed joy).
Think of the tiny verbal charges. In “Drunk Autumn Midnight Below Victoria Embankment”, the sky is “like a loose tarpaulin”, the air “sweet, like rust”, the river marked like a “watermark” (Hill, n.d.c). In “Gravity”, he asks how long one must sit still “to hear the dead”, then admits he is “not still enough” (Hill, 2026).
Hill was — and in some profound way still is — always listening. And now we are listening to him.
Closing reflection
What I learnt from Tobias Hill is that writing does not become profound by moving away from things. It becomes profound by moving more deeply into them. A tunnel, a station entrance, a wren, a watch, a market, a stretch of riverbank, a cat circling a room, these are not minor details in Hill. They are entrances into history, feeling and consciousness.
He pursued mystery through specificity; he loved underground spaces; he wrote with unusual humanity; he allowed metaphor to rise from the grain of the world; and he mined the unconscious without surrendering joy. It is a rare combination, and one that ensures his work continues to speak to us.
References
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (2013) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Crown, S. (2006) ‘London, light and love’, The Guardian, 26 August. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview23 (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Hill, T. (2004) ‘It’s worth remembering that poetry is an oral form at heart’, The Guardian, 23 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/23/poetry (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Hill, T. (n.d.) ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cat’, The Poetry Society. Available at: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/the-lighthouse-keepers-cat/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Hill, T. (n.d.) ‘The Nightworkers’, The Poetry Society. Available at: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/the-nightworkers/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Hill, T. (n.d.) ‘Drunk Autumn Midnight Below Victoria Embankment’, Scottish Poetry Library. Available at: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/drunk-autumn-midnight-below-victoria-embankment/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Mars-Jones, A. (2001) ‘Her rubies are far above price’, The Guardian, 21 January. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/21/crimebooks.adammarsjones (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Nadler, S.M. (2009) Spinoza’s Ethics: an introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Patterson, C. (2014) ‘Tobias Hill: “During the last novel, it was so difficult that I just caved in because I was so hungry to write poetry”’, The Guardian, 28 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/tobias-hill-interview (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Salt (2026) Collected Poems by Tobias Hill. Available at: https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/collected-poems-9781784633752 (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Shamsie, K. (2009) ‘The secret history of the Spartans’, The Observer, 11 January. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/the-hidden-tobias-hill (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Shamsie, K. (2023) ‘Tobias Hill obituary’, The Guardian, 13 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/13/tobias-hill-obituary (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
The Observer (2026) ‘The Sunday Poem: Gravity by Tobias Hill’, The Observer, 22 March. Available at: https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/the-sunday-poem-gravity-by-tobias-hill (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
The Poetry Society (2025) ‘Sharon Black wins the new Tobias Hill Poetry Prize’. Available at: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poetry-news/the-tobias-hill-poetry-prize/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
The Poetry Society (2026) ‘The Tobias Hill Poetry Prize’. Available at: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/the-tobias-hill-poetry-prize/ (Accessed: 5 April 2026).
Tate (n.d.) Tobias Hill audio. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/audio/tobias-hill (Accessed: 5 April 2026).