Julian Flanagan’s 2017 readings from this book (on YouTube video).

Cooking with Cancer is poetry served up in the form of a menu: Starters, Main Course, Afters, Digestif.

“Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks, and looks again. Matter-of-factly, it refuses to flinch.” – Mario Petrucci.

This poetic chronicle, spiked with humour, leads the reader through an unpredictable odyssey as cancer interrupts life and life interrupts cancer, as loyalty and belief are tested, and as the author is ambushed by the idiosyncrasies and changing ages of love.

Julian Flanagan was born in Peru in 1962, brought up in India, Cheshire and Dubai, and educated at Stonyhurst and LSE. After 20 years as an advertising copywriter, he became a freelance journalist. His interviews and features appeared in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The FT Weekend, FT Magazine, Time Out, The Independent on Sunday and economist.com. Over the last 30 years his poetry was published in magazines such as Ambit, Brittle Star, Envoi, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Iota, The Manchester Review, The Rialto, Seam and The Spectator. He lived in London with his wife and three children.

Julian Flanagan died on 29 August 2018.

English Patient

On the parade to diagnosis,
turning through hooped scanners
and narrowing possibilities,
one idiot hope tagged along:
that I did have cancer,
that it was blood in the bowl
because if, after all the fuss,
it was only the beetroot I’d been eating,
the embarrassment could kill me.

from Cooking with Cancer.