One of his recent successes was Rachael Boast, whose Sidereal won last year’s Forward Prize for best first collection. Paterson honed the book with her for a number of years, which is “not unusual for a first book”. Once their inner sense of what is valuable in their writing is better calibrated, he says, they don’t require as much “intense feedback”. How intense can it get? “I’ll make a long list of specific queries, and then fight about it with the author in the office or the pub or the British Library for three days while we go through each poem a line at a time.”