Jim Anderson was a contemporary of Lester Piggott as an apprentice jockey but an injury ruined his chance of a successful career.

Instead he turned to journalism and writing becoming a sports editor and feature writer on provincial and Sunday national papers, including some years writing football for the Sunday Express and Sunday People. He has now put his love of and knowledge about the turf into poetry.

His love for the sport, its history, its people and above its horses, shines through in his poems and you can hear him reciting three of them by going to 'News' on the left hand menu.

Some of the poems in 'Shergar and other friends' have been published previously but this is his first full anthology.

... well worth the attention of racing fans with a literary bent ... Anderson has a good eye, a good ear, a sound grasp of structure and rhyme-scheme, and, most importantly of all, first-hand knowledge of, and love for, thoroughbred racehorses.
charming anthology... great entertainment.
Andrew Baker, The Daily Telegraph

... original, skilful and strikingly affecting reflections by a most welcome fresh voice, former jockey Jim Anderson... Owners, trainers, runners, riders, horses, courses, the quick and the dud. Stimulating stuff, and on the whole - as he should - Anderson champions the little men. Anderson is a rare bird, the sporting poet who twigs the sportsman's very thick of things.
Frank Keating, The Guardian