Besieged
Colin Campbell Robinson & Paul Hawkins

Jan 19

Burning House Press guest editor Kawai Shen published some collaborative work by myself and Colin Campbell Robinson today. Holy Water Overflow can be downloaded in full from their website. We have been collaborating on a series of four long poems Colin wrote and now have these poems collected as a book, as yet unpublished, called Besieged. Colin wrote the words and I did the photography and art. Take a look and download the free PDF HERE

Colin Campbell Robinson was born in Manchester in 1953 and emigrated with his family to Australia at the age of nine. After a less than stellar academic  career and years of factory work and odd jobs, he became involved in community activism, working with organisations such as the Tenants’ Union. In the 1990s  he founded a social research consultancy and became known in Australia for his writing on social justice issues, working with various non-government  organisations to change the situation faced by people experiencing homelessness, mental health problems, addiction and poverty, often all of the above.  Colin returned to Britain in 2003 and continued to do social research, notably with The Passage, London’s largest day centre for the homeless. Since 2013 he  has devoted himself full-time to writing and photography. His work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies around the world. His books have  been published by by Knives Forks Spoons Press; Blue Solitude in 2018, Footnotes from History – the Debord Variations in 2021 and Resistance in 2025. Colin  currently lives on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland and in Edinburgh.