Heart’s Hunger spans thirty years of Karen Press’s writing, including love poems, historical, political poems, lyrics, satires and poems of place.

Karen Press was born in Cape Town in 1956, where she lives and works as a freelance editor and writer. She has published ten collections of poems, including The Little Museum of Working Life (2004), The Canary’s Songbook (2005), Slowly, As If (2012) and The Loving and Loveable City (May Not Yet Be Here): An Atlas of the Cape Peninsula (2023). In 1987 she co-founded the publishing collective Buchu Books. In 2015 she received the Literary Translators Award for the translation into English of Mede-wete and Synapse by Antjie Krog.