Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections: American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts […]

Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. His debut collection, Tongues of Fire (Cape), was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, 2020, and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, 2021. He won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2016, the Resurgence Prize in 2017, and an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. […]

Stephanie Sy-Quia is a writer and critic based in London. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and France. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and elsewhere. She is a member of the Ledbury Critics Programme and has twice been shortlisted for the FT […]

Iain Twiddy studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Harvard Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. He has written two critical studies, Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2012) and Cancer Poetry […]

Jack Nicholls is the author of Meat Songs, an Emma Press pamphlet, and his poems have featured in publications such as The Poetry Review, The Tangerine and The Scores. His first play Harsh Noise Wall received a rehearsed reading at the Royal Court Theatre and was longlisted for the 2019 Bruntwood Prize. He comes from […]

Luke Allan is poetry editor at Partus Press and co-edits the magazines Pain and Oxford Poetry. Originally from Newcastle, he studied literature and creative writing at UEA and Oxford and was formerly managing editor at Carcanet Press and PN Review. Recently he won the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition, and was placed second in the Bridport […]

Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and lives in East London. His poems have been published in numerous places, including Wild Court, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and Structo, and his first collection West South North, North South East was published in 2019 by The High Window Press. He is also the author of a novel, All The […]

Jennifer Hyde came third in a school poetry contest at age nine, and has secretly written poems ever since. She studied languages and literature at the University of Oxford, before working as an actor in Colombia for six years, where she saved her parents from drowning in the sea. This event provided her with the opportunity to […]

Marvin Thompson was born in London to Jamaican parents and now lives in mountainous south Wales. His debut poetry collection, Road Trip (Peepal Tree, 2020), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and selected as one of its five Black Lives Matter Inspiration books. It was also one of forty recommended collections for National Poetry Day […]

Marie Baléo is a French writer, poet, and editor born in 1990, who writes in English, her second language. Her work has appeared in Yemassee, CutBank, Passages North, Redivider, Salamander, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for four Best of the Net awards and her forthcoming chapbook was longlisted for the [PANK] Book Contest. Marie […]

In 2020, Jane Wilkinson won first and second prizes in the Guernsey Literary Festival Poetry Prize, first prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and the Norfolk Prize in Café Writers Open Poetry Competition. In 2019, she won the Against the Grain competition and was shortlisted in Alpine Fellowship Prize. Her work has appeared in […]

Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) was a Japanese writer of free verse, active in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He is considered the “father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan”. He published many volumes of essays, literary and cultural criticism, and aphorisms over his long career. Jae Kim is a fiction writer and a […]

Tarn MacArthur is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and is at work on his first collection of poems.

Kaleem Hawa’s debut poetry collection, She Thinks She’s the Passionate One (2020), won the White Review Poet’s Prize.

Petra White is an Australian poet living in London, her most recent book is Reading for a Quiet Morning (Gloria SMH, 2017).

Phillip B. Williams is a native of Chicago, Illinois (USA) and author of Thief in the Interior (Alice James, 2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Rushika Wick is a writer with an interest in visual poetics and human rights. Her first full length collection with Verve is out in spring 2021.

Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool; she has published two poetry collections with Carcanet (Missel-Child, 2014, and City of Departures, 2019) and is working on a third.

Julia Donaldson is a bestselling author of children’s books whose many works include the modern children’s classics THE GRUFFALO, STICK MAN and ROOM ON THE BROOM (illustrated by Axel Scheffler) and the WHAT THE LADYBIRD HEARD series (illustrated by Lydia Monks). Her books have sold more than 90 million copies worldwide and won numerous major […]

Annie Wright’s second full collection is Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow (Smokestack Books, 2019) and she’s a regular performer at The Bakehouse, Gatehouse of Fleet in Scotland.

John Morrison was brought up in Liverpool. He lives in London where he worked as a journalist and speechwriter, and now cultivates his tomatoes.

Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo-Armenian poet who lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Her first pamphlet will be published by Against the Grain Press in spring 2022.

Vanessa Lampert is a poet and acupuncturist from Wallingford, Oxfordshire. She won the Café Writers and Ver poetry prizes in 2020 and came second in the Fish and International Oxford Brookes poetry prizes. Vanessa co-edits the online and print magazine The Alchemy Spoon. Her pamphlet On Long Loan was published by Live Canon in October […]

Nicky has recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing at York St John University and she is a student mentor in creative writing classes for Converge – the university’s outreach programme for people recovering from mental health difficulties. She has been twice-shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry, longlisted for the Gingko Eco Poetry Prize […]

Derek Hughes is a retired GP, living in semi-rural Leicestershire to which he moved to be involved in his two granddaughter’s upbringing. He has written all his life and is a member of The Poetry Society’s South Leicestershire Stanza. He’s been placed several times in competitions and was delighted to win First Prize in the […]

A Forward Prize nominee and Hawthornden Fellow, Mary-Jane has won the Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2020, Bath Novella-in-Flash Prize 2020, the Bridport Poetry prize 2017, Martin Starkie, Dromineer, Reflex Fiction and Mslexia Flash prize as well as the Bedford Poetry competition. In 2020 she was also shortlisted for the Beverley International Prize for Literature […]

Sue Spiers lives near Southampton and started writing seriously in 2006 when she began a BA in Literature with the Open University. Her first collection, Jiggle Sac, was published in 2012. 2020 sees the publication of Plague – A Season of Senryu. Her work has appeared in many journals including Acumen, The Interpreters House, Orbis, […]

Jules Whiting grew up in the country village of Cholsey, Oxfordshire, and much of the inspiration for her poetry comes from the village and the surrounding countryside, including Lollingdon, The Downs, and Wittenham Clumps. She obtained an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have appeared in Orbis, South, Envoi, The Interpreters […]

Jane is currently working on her first pamphlet on the subject of Alzheimer’s. This a condition she knows well having cared for her dad, but it also enables her to explore the meaning of self, memories, identity, language, communication and what it means to be alive. This year, 2020, she has had poems published in […]

Elizabeth Barton grew up in Surrey. She studied at Cambridge University and has an MA in English. After doing her Postgraduate Certificate in Education, she taught English and Classical Civilisation at a secondary school. She moved with her husband to Madrid, Spain and Virginia, U.S.A. and has since returned to Surrey. Whilst raising her family, […]

Philip Burton has a love for readings and performance, developed through life as an English and Drama teacher, Lancashire head teacher, folksinger, actor, and multi-award-winning poet. He was also, for some years, a poetry practitioner who, as Pip The Poet, provided hundreds of poetry days for schools and also for adult learners. Three hundred and […]

Fawzia Muradali Kane is a Trinidadian architect and poet, sometimes based in London. Her debut Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press, 2011) was a poetry finalist for the Bocas Lit Fest Prize. Her pamphlet, Houses of the Dead, was published by Thamesis in 2014.

Kimberly Reyes has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Callaloo, the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht in Ireland, the Munster Literature Centre, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Film Ireland, […]

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her most recent poetry collection is Eidolon (Shearsman, 2015). She is also a co-author, with Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil, of Threads, published by Clinic.

Rowan Lyster is a poet, cartoonist and arts administrator from Herefordshire, whose work is forthcoming in Magma, Tears in the Fence and Under The Radar. She can be found on Twitter at @rowanlyster.

James Giddings was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, Ambit and Magma, and in 2015 he was awarded a Northern Writers award. His debut pamphlet Everything is Scripted won Templar Poetry’s Book and Pamphlet Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Saboteur […]

Jacquie Shanahan has an MA in Creative Writing and is a member of The Poetry Society’s Chiltern Poets Stanza. She works as a technical publisher and volunteers in support of language development in the NHS/Adult Learning, which has inspired some of her poems. ‘the puzzle room’ was one of the winners in The Poetry Society’s […]

D. Nurkse is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult, A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island and The Fall (published by Alfred Knopf). CB Editions, London, also published a British edition of A Night in Brooklyn. Voices over Water was shortlisted for […]

Isabelle Baafi is a writer and poet from London. Her debut pamphlet will be published by ignitionpress in autumn 2020.

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the […]

Mona Arshi was born in West London where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer for a decade before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press 2015), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Gods was published […]

Dana Swensen is a writer and a teacher. She is currently completing a PhD in English at University of California, Berkeley.

Eithne Cullen is a member of Forest Poets and writes poetry and stories. She has published two novels, The Ogress of Reading and Never not in my Thoughts.

Sara is a London-based poet, who is currently in her final year of an MA in Poetry with Newcastle University. Her work has appeared in several anthologies.

Matthew Griffiths is the author of the collection Natural Economy and the critical work The New Poetics of Climate Change. He lives in London with his wife and cat.

Mairghread McLundie lives near Glasgow and has a background in computing science and design/craft. Her work has been published in Gliberagora, New Writing Scotland 29, and Postbox Magazine. She co-founded Four-em Press in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize 2019.

Penny Blackburn lives in North East England and writes poetry and short fiction around her day job as a teacher of special needs students. She is co-host of “Cullerpoets” – the North East Stanza group – and particularly enjoys performing off-page at live events. Her debut pamphlet, with Yaffle Press, will be released in Summer […]

D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham and educated at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the poetry collections Incognegro (Salt, 2006), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008), The Bloods (Shearsman, 2011) and Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019). His chapbooks include In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). His critical books include On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and […]

Linda Gregerson is an American poet and member of faculty at the University of Michigan. In 2014, she was named as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of six collections, most recently Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976 to 2014 (Houghton Mifflin, 2015). Her many prizes include a Guggenheim […]

Yomi Ṣode is a Nigerian British writer, performer, facilitator and Complete Works Alumni. He has read poems at Lagos International Poetry Festival, Afrika Fest with Speaking Volumes in Finland, the New York Public Library with the British Council and at Edinburgh International Book Festival. His writing has been published widely, in The Rialto magazine and […]

Rosie Shepperd’s That so-easy thing (2012) was a Poetry Business prizewinner. Her collection is The Man at the Corner Table (Seren, 2015) and she is writing her doctorate (Goldsmiths) to identify a way to understand a poem/reading as a paradigm of the creative process of the poet/reader. She was a finalist for the Cardiff, Forward, […]

Louisa Adjoa Parker is a poet and writer of English-Ghanaian heritage. Her latest poetry collection, How to wear a skin, was published by Indigo Dreams, and her first collection and pamphlet were published by Cinnamon Press. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has twice been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize, and […]

Joe Dunthorne was born and grew up in Swansea. His first novel, Submarine, won the Curtis Brown Award and was translated into twenty languages. His second, Wild Abandon, won the Encore Prize. His latest is The Adulterants. His first collection of poems, O Positive, was published last year by Faber & Faber. He lives in […]

Gerald Smith likes three things: big cities, bikes, and stories about dead relatives. His work has been published by Glass Mountain and Z Publishing , and in 2017, he won the University of Houston Provost Prize for his poem ‘Anemoia’ . Currently, he is writing a collection of poetry entitled Micha Anemoia Bear, about trying […]

US-born Cheryl Moskowitz studied Psychology at Sussex University, and started out as an actor/playwright, and performance poet with the radical 1980s poetry collective Angels of Fire. She has been published in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, and The Manhattan Review amongst others; won prizes in the Bridport, Troubadour, Kent & Sussex and Hippocrates poetry […]

Charlotte Knight is a British-Ukrainian poet. She is currently studying an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She also works in an inbound call centre where she writes poems between calls. Her poetry is concerned with grief, pregnancy, goats and the moon. Her work has previously been featured in Magma […]

Ann Pelletier-Topping was born in Montreal, Canada, and has lived in the UK since 1989. She has been writing since 2012 but her interest in poetry began in 2015 while doing a Creative Writing module at the Open University. Writing and reading poetry have since become a necessity and a little haven of happiness. In […]

Susannah Hart’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018 and her poem ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’ won first prize in the 2019 National Poetry Competition. […]

Thomas McCarthy was born in County Waterford, Ireland, and is the author of eight poetry collections. Pandemonium (Carcanet, 2016) was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award. His most recent, Prophecy, was published by Carcanet in 2019. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists and writers. He has won the Patrick […]

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017, and Bloodaxe Books, 2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award, the Texas Book Award […]

Samantha Walton is a poet, academic and publisher based in Bristol. Her first poetry collection is Self Heal (Boiler House, 2018) and she co-edits Sad Press poetry.

Soumyaroop Majumdar is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Durham University. He has previously been published in Transect.

Kathrin Schmidt is a German poet and prose writer. Her latest collection waschplatz der kühlen dinge (2018) addresses globalisation and migration using the language of politics, advertising and the internet.

With Arts Council support Sue Vickerman is being mentored by Fiona Sampson to develop a cross-genre manuscript including her own poems, some translations of poems, and an element of translation theory, bound by a fictional narrator. Sue has benefited in the past from four Arts Council England awards and has published five works of poetry […]

Alice Miller is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters. She has worked as an historian, a poetry lecturer, and a writer and editor for the United Nations. Alice has published two collections of poetry: The Limits (Shearsman, 2014) and Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion, 2018), a Poetry Book Society […]

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Co. Tyrone,  Northern Ireland, and studied English at the University of Cambridge, where he won the Quiller-Couch Award for creative writing. His debut collection, To a Fault (Faber, 2005), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize; his second, On Purpose (Faber, 2007), the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber […]

Amy Acre is the editor of Bad Betty Press and the author of two pamphlets, And They Are Covered in Gold Light (Bad Betty) and Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads (flipped eye), each chosen as a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poem, ‘every girl knows’ won the 2019 Verve Poetry Prize.

Annabelle Fuller is the winner of the under 19 category of the 2018 BBC Proms Poetry Competition.

Christine Vial – East End baby-boomer, teacher, writer and social activist – published her debut pamphlet Dancing in Blue Flip-flops (RQ pamphlet series) in 2018.

Judith Dimond has been writing poetry for twenty years now, since moving into ‘the second half of life’, and now can’t imagine living without it.

Hannah Swingler is a poet, storyteller, artist and teacher. Her first collection The Dress Has Pockets was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2019. ​ She has performed across the country and internationally, on stages, streets and radio. Her work explores themes of nostalgia, family relationships, mental health, and local history and heritage. Hannah has been […]

Jane Commane is a poet, writer and editor based in the Midlands, UK. Her debut collection of poems, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe Books in February 2018 and she was a Jerwood Compton Fellow in 2017-18.  

Hannah Brockbank is joint winner of the 2016 Kate Betts Award. Publications featuring her work include Hallelujah for 50ft Women Anthology (Bloodaxe), A Way through the Woods Anthology (Binsted Arts), Full Moon & Foxglove Anthology (Three Drops Press), The London Magazine, Envoi, Sarasvati, Atrium, Procreate MAMA, When Women Waken Journal, Bonnie’s Crew (in aid of […]

David published his first collection An Essex Parish in 2015. He was long-listed in the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition in 2017, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2017 and 2018 and won first prize and a special mention in the Sentinel Quarterly Literary Review in Summer 2017. In 2016 he featured in the Essex […]

Veronica Zundel is an Oxford English graduate and freelance writer for the Christian market who has just completed the Poetry School/Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry. She writes a regular column for Woman Alive magazine, for which she won a national award as Best Specialist Columnist, beating columnists for the Mail on Sunday. She has […]

Antony Mair now lives in Hastings, but has lived in Germany and France and spent time as an English language teacher, Benedictine monk, shopkeeper in New Bond Street and, for the major part of his professional life, a commercial lawyer in the City, before becoming an estate agent in the Dordogne.  He founded the Hastings […]

Originally from Yorkshire, Michael has lived in London since 1998 and is a member of the Forest Poets Stanza in Walthamstow. He has had one pamphlet and two collections of poetry published by the Paekakariki Press: Euphrasy (2012), Walthamstow (2015) and To London (2017). Michael was longlisted in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and his […]

Niall Firth is a journalist from Darlington who lives in north-east London. His poems have been published widely in magazines such as The Rialto, Lighthouse, Litmus, Butcher’s Dog, and The Interpreter’s House and on websites like And Other Poems and Ink, Sweat and Tears. He was long-listed in the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2018, when […]

A former actor, Alastair Llewellyn-Smith buys and sell wine for a living. He is married, and has four adult children. He has been writing poems all his life. He’s also written five (unpublished) novels since 1998, but returned full-time to poetry at the beginning of 2016. Since then, he’s had poems and reviews published in […]

Belinda has worked as a psychiatric nurse, lecturer and creative arts practitioner. Her poems have been widely published in magazines, on-line journals and anthologies, including: Under the Radar, Ambit, Brittle Star, Dream Catcher, Eye Flash, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. In 2017, she won the Poetry in Motion Competition to turn her poem into an […]

Penny Boxall is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award with Ship of the Line. Her second collection, Who Goes There?, is published by Valley Press. Her collection-in-progress has won a Northern Writer’s Award (2019) and a grant from the Authors’ Foundation. She won […]

Sue Burge is a poet and freelance creative writing and film studies tutor based in North Norfolk.

Born in Northern Ireland, Jo Burns lives in Germany. Her poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry News, Southword, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, Magma and elsewhere. She won the McClure Poetry Prize 2017 at the Irish Writers Festival, CA, the Magma Poetry Competition 2018, the New Irish Writing in Germany Poetry […]

David Borrott has an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. His poetry has been anthologised in Watermark, published by Flax, and in CAST: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets. His pamphlet Porthole (Smith|Doorstop, 2015) is part of the Poetry Business Laureate’s Choice series, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy.

Winner of Aesthetica Magazine’s 2018 Creative Writing Award in Poetry and the 2017 Ledbury Poetry Competition, Jonathan Greenhause lives in New Jersey, USA, with his wife and two sons. He misses Wales.

Rory Waterman’s two collections, both from Carcanet, are Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for a Heaney Award, and Sarajevo Roses (2017), shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize.

Valzhyna Mort, described by the Irish Times as “[a] risen star of the international poetry world”, was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her poetry collections include Factory of Tears and Collected Body (published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008 and 2011); her third collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, was published in 2020 by Farrar, […]

Romalyn Ante’s debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, is forthcoming from Chatto in 2020.

Mark Waldron was born in New York in 1960 and grew up in London. He began writing poetry in his early forties and published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011). His third collection, Meanwhile, Trees, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, and his fourth, Sweet, like Rinky-Dink, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. […]

Tehila Hakimi is a Hebrew-language poet, fiction writer and mechanical engineer from Israel. Her debut poetry collection, We’ll Work Tomorrow (Tangier Publishing), won the 2015 Bernstein Prize for Literature. Her most recent title is Company (Resling, 2018).

Elaine Feinstein, who died on 23 September 2019, was an award-winning poet, novelist and biographer. She grew up in Leicester and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She was the author of over thirty books, including fiction and biography, and wrote for radio and television. Her reviews and essays appeared regularly in The Poetry Review […]

Rachel was a runner-up in the 19+ category in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2019.

Renée was a runner-up in the 12-18 category in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2019.

Anna Szabó was born in Romania in 1972 and moved to Hungary in 1987, where she studied Hungarian and English. She translates into Hungarian, and has worked with Joyce, Plath, Yeats, and Updike. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-three, winning the Petofi Prize for promising young poets. Her poetry has […]

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet. She was the 2019/2020 Young People’s Laureate for London and is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets programme. Her debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium was published by Nine Arches Press In February 2019. She is leading on #MyMentalHealthJourney, a project run by Spread the Word […]

Hugh Smith is a writer from London. He works as an ESL teacher and audio transcriptionist.

Suji Kwock Kim is the author of Notes from the Divided Country, which won the Addison Metcalf Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers/ Northern California Book Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin Prize. Her chapbook, Notes from the North, was a winner in the 2018/2019 […]

Joey Connolly grew up in Sheffield and now lives in London, where he works as Head of Faber Academy. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his first collection, Long Pass, was published by Carcanet in 2017.

Pauline Sturges has a Masters in Creative Writing (Novels) and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2016 and in 2018. She was longlisted for The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2018. Pauline interprets her lived world with words and pictures: the bleak Pennine moors inform a poetry of grief for Earth’s uncertain future alongside […]

Phil Coleman has been writing since his teenage years. He lives near Swansea.

Clare Best’s first full collection, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize 2012. She has performed her autobiographical poem cycle ‘Self-portrait without Breasts’ across the UK and Ireland, and in the USA and Canada. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless and CELL. Springlines, a collaboration with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, exploring […]

Joanna Guthrie’s first collection Billack’s Bones was published by Rialto in 2007. She was selected for the Aldeburgh Eight in 2018. She has recently completed her second collection Water Person Kit. Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Ireland Review and Rialto. Her prose has appeared The […]

Angela Platt was The Poetry Society Stanza Rep for Newport and and had been a Poetry Society Member for many years. In summer 2019 Angela’s poem ‘Moonshine’ was published in Poetry News in response to our competition judged by Kit Fan. Kit said: “The speaker’s sharp-eyed observations take us through the divide between nature and […]

BBC Slam Champion and Scottish National Slam Finalist, Jess Green is a performance poet and playwright who has performed at Glastonbury, Latitude, Bestival and the Edinburgh Fringe. Her first collection, Burning Books (2015, Burning Eye Books) was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award and as a live show received 5* reviews at the Edinburgh […]

Kat Francois is a performance artist, poet, actor, playwright, director, youth and adult workshop facilitator, and comedian. Kat was the first person to win a televised poetry slam in the UK, on BBC3 in 2004, and a year later went on to win the World Slam Poetry Championships in Rotterdam. As a playwright, Kat has […]

Sharon Olds (born November 19, 1942) is an American poet. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University. Stag’s Leap (Cape, 2012) won […]

B.C. Leale (1930–2018) worked as a bookseller for many years at Claude Gill Books in London’s Oxford Street, resolutely defending a poetry section that was full of surprises. His own work appeared in more than fifty publications, including Encounter, the London Review of Books, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and Ambit, Bang, but it […]

Les Murray (17 October 1938 – 29 April 2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah, New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister’s Department. Murray first visited Europe in the sixties, and returned frequently […]

Patricia Childerhouse is a lifelong lover of poetry but teaching A-level Eng Lit for twenty years put her off trying to write any. Now in her crone-age she is having a go and enjoying it. Her book Twenty Sussex Walks was published by Snake River Press when her surname was Bowen. She has had one […]

Lia Brooks’ poetry can be found in Poetry London, Mslexia, Magma and Agenda, among others in the UK and US. Her work has been commended in the Troubadour Poetry Prize, the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and the Café Writers Poetry Competition. It has also been shortlisted in the Bridport Poetry Prize and the Mslexia Poetry Competition. […]

Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist. Her pamphlet, Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity was published by Goldsmiths Press. She’s had poems in the LRB, Poetry London, Ambit, and The Rialto among others and was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. She’s completed residencies for the National Trust, Tate Britain, K6 Gallery and Royal Holloway University. Her collaborative installation The Six Pillars of […]

Nick Garrard works as a teacher in London, where he lives with his girlfriend and their cheese plant, Chas. He has written for 3AM, Literary Review and the Independent on Sunday. His poetry has appeared in Magma and as part of the podcast series, ‘Bedtime Stories for the End of the World‘.

Amaury Wonderling is a poet and filmmaker. He holds a Master’s Degree in Physics, a Bachelor’s Degree in Screenwriting, and studies Philosophy in his spare time. He enjoys drinking Bénédictine, watching Mixed Martial Arts and listening to Burial. He is currently working on his first poetry collection.

Natalie Shaw lives and works in London. She has a kind husband and children of varying sizes. She is currently editing Medusa and Her Sisters, a book of poems written in response to drawings by artist Natalie Sirett.

Vasiliki Albedo lives in Greece and has worked with fuel cell technology, as a children’s entertainer, in the daycare centre of a psychiatric hospital, and for NGOs promoting green technology in developing countries . In 2017 she placed second in the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre competition (EAL), and won joint third place in the Brian […]

Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born poet and voiceover, and one half of the team behind collaborative press Sidekick Books. Her work has been published by Happenstance and Salt, widely anthologised, and thrown out of a helicopter. She won the 2011 and 2017 Live Canon International Poetry Prizes, and is currently working on her second collection […]

Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada – the daughter of Northern Irish parents.  In 2016 she was published in Primers Volume One (Nine Arches).  She has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition twice, and her pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant was longlisted in the Paper Swans Press competition.  Her work has appeared in […]

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate and Starbucks’ Poet in Residence, and is presently the Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence. Roy’s writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Out of […]

Tishani Doshi is a poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, she spent part of her childhood in Wales, gained her Masters from Johns Hopkins University in the US, and worked in London before returning to India to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, with whom she performed on many international stages. She received […]

Hannah Sullivan lives in London with her husband and two sons and is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2008 and taught in California for four years. Her study of modernist writing, The Work of Revision, was published in 2013 and awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay […]

Susan Richardson is a poet, performer, educator and editor, whose collections, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, Where the Air is Rarefied, skindancing and Words the Turtle Taught Me are published by Cinnamon Press. In addition to her residency with the Marine Conservation Society, she was poet-in-residence with the global animal welfare initiative, World Animal Day. […]

Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer and game designer, Editor-in-Chief at Salt Hill, and the author of two books of poetry: Inside Ball Lightning (SEMO Press) and Glorious Veils of Diane (Carnegie Mellon University Press). They are an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, where they were awarded the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. Read more […]

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India, and raised in Falls Church, Virginia. She earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her MFA from Indiana University, where she was the recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poetry. She is the author of two full collections: Train to Agra and Afternoon Masala, as […]

David Clarke’s second collection of poetry, The Europeans, is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press in March 2019.

Sharon retired from a career in education in 2015. Since then, she has been learning to write poems, some of which have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The High Window, Snakeskin and Algebra of Owls, amongst others.

Sarah Reeson is a mother of two. She uses poetry and prose to free her creative spirit.

Andrew Fentham is a writer and translator based in Cornwall.

Kinga Fabó is a poet, linguist and philosopher based in Budapest. Her books include five collections of poetry in Hungarian.

Ralf Webb lives and works in London. Recent poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Test Centre, Hotel and PAIN.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s latest collection, The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Duo Yu co-founded the prominent ‘Lower Body’ Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s.

Janet Sutherland studied at Cardiff and Essex Universities, and has an MA in American Poetry. She works as a poet, editor and freelance workshop provider and mentor. Her poems have appeared in magazines including The Poetry Review, The New Statesman, The Rialto, The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review and The London Magazine, and are widely anthologised, […]

Patricia Bishop was born and bred in London but has lived in various places since. She has been published in many magazines and anthologies and her work has been read on Radio 4 and various local radio stations. In 1994, she was the joint second prize winner for the National Poetry Competition.

Catherine Byron is an Irish poet whose first book of poetry, Settlements, appeared in 1985, and she has since published five collections, the most recent being The Getting of Vellum (which was reissued by the Salmon press in 2007).

Joseph Coelho’s poems have been published in several Macmillan anthologies including Green Glass Beads edited by Jacqueline Wilson. Joseph has been a guest poet on CBeebies Rhyme Rocket where he was beamed up from The Rhyme Rock to perform his Bug Poem and has featured alongside Michael Rosen and Valerie Bloom on Radio 4’s Poetry […]

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Fothermather was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and made into a programme for Radio 4 and the Seriously… podcast, produced by Conor Garrett. She is Senior Lecturer in […]

Joseph Butler is a blacksmith, boat-builder, poet and nurse. His work reflects a lifelong interest in the links between creativity and wellbeing. He has led participatory arts events across a range of media, including creative writing workshops in schools, prisons, hospitals and colleges of higher education. He lives in a narrowboat on the South Oxford […]

Eleni Cay is a Slovakian-born poet writing in English and Slovak. Her most recent poems appeared in Atticus Review, Glasgow Review of Books, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and Envoi. Her poems were also published in anthologies and translated to German, French and Romanian. Eleni’s award-winning collection of Slovak poems A Butterfly’s Trembling in the Digital […]

Josephine Corcoran’s work as a short story writer and playwright has been broadcast on BBC R4 and R4Extra. She has published two poetry collections, a pamphlet with tall-lighthouse and a full collection with Nine Arches Press. She is founder and editor of the online site And Other Poems and works as a writer in schools […]

Rob Miles is from Devon and lives in Yorkshire. His poetry has appeared widely or is forthcoming in magazines and anthologies such as Ambit, Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, York Literary Review, South Bank Poetry, Angle, The New European, Stand, The Anthology of Age and The Anthology of Love (both the Emma Press), The Garden (OWF […]

Lesley was born in Doncaster and now lives in Ledbury. At 12 she wanted to be a poet, but at 14 the school Careers Officer told her that any career in writing was a ‘silly idea’. At 49 she gave herself permission to try, and gained a CW Diploma from the Open University followed by […]

Helen’s poems have been published by Mslexia, Leaf Books, Shoestring Press, Soundswrite Press and other poetry publications.  She started reading and writing poetry when she got a job in a prison teaching creative writing sessions. A few years ago, she began studying for a Fine Art degree. In 2016 she was selected to show her […]

Carl Griffin is from Swansea. His poems have appeared in Cake, Magma, Poetry Wales, Ink sweat and tears and the Cheval anthology series. He was recently longlisted for the Cinnamon Poetry Pamphlet Prize and the Melita Hume Prize, and also commended in the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize. He has reviewed for Wales Arts Review.

Steve Xerri has worked as a teacher, musician and designer. He now splits his time between making pottery and writing poetry.

Sarah Barnsley lives in Hove and is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent magazine credits include Poetry Wales, Shearsman and The White Review. Other publications include a pamphlet, The Fire Station (Telltale Press, 2015), and literary criticism; her edition of Mary Barnard’s Complete Poems is forthcoming.

K.V. Skene is a Canadian poet whose work has been widely published. A winner of the erbacce prize for poetry 2018, her collection Unoriginal Sins was published recently by erbacce-press. She was also a winner of the 2018 Cinnamon Press Pamphlet competition; her pamphlet The Love Life of Bus Shelters is due early 2019.

Frances Wilson was awarded 2nd Prize in the 1990 National Poetry Competition.

Patricia Pogson won 2nd Prize in the 1989 National Poetry Competition

Alison Winch is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is author of Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Palgrave, 2013) and co-editor of Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (Bloomsbury, 2013). Her debut pamphlet, Trouble, was published in 2016 by The Emma Press. Her forthcoming collection is out in […]

Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator and editor. His most recent collection, The Water Stealer (Faber, 2015), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; he was previously shortlisted for A Word from the Loki (1995). Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in both the Sunday Times and Irish Times. The Holy Land […]

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry from […]

Anna Maria Carpi is an Italian writer and translator. Her collected poems, E io che intanto parlo, was published by Marcos y Marcos in 2016.

Mathilde is a runner-up in the Under 19s category of the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2018.

Aidan is a runner-up in the Under 19s category of the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2018.

Ian was a runner-up in the over 19 category in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2018.

Olga won the 19+ category in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2019, and was a runner-up in the in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2018.

Rachel Curzon was the winner in the over 19 category in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2018.

Nansŏrhŏn – meaning “White Orchid” – is the penname of Hŏ Ch’ŏhŭi (1563–1589), a Korean noblewoman, writes Ian Haight. Writing in the sixteenth century, Nansŏrhŏn faced tremendous obstacles. Noblewomen in the time of Nansŏrhŏn were generally not given a classical education on a par with noblemen; it was socially unacceptable for them to paint, sing, […]

Kim Hyesoon is an award-winning South Korean poet. The most recent English translation of her work (by Don Mee Choi) is I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe, 2014).

Keith Jarrett is a performance poet and fiction writer. He has written for various publications, including The Mechanics’ Institute Review 5, Tell Tales Vol. IV, Pulp Net and, most recently, Boys and Girls. He has written poetry in both English and Spanish. He’s a former London and UK Poetry Slam! Champion and his collection Selah was […]

Vidyan Ravinthiran is an editor at Prac Crit and the author of Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) and Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015). He teaches at the University of Birmingham.

Raymond Antrobus is a Hackney-born British Jamaican poet, educator, editor and curator of the Chill Pill event series. His pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (2017), is published by Out-Spoken Press and debut collection The Perseverance was the winner of the Ted Hughes Award in 2018. He is a Complete Works III fellow and one of the […]

Louis Bourne is a poet and Professor Emeritus of Spanish, Georgia College & State University. He has recently published translations of poems by Cubans Rafael Bordao, Felipe Lázaro, Juan Nicolás Padrón and Pío Serrano in Illuminations magazine, and will publish the first translation of Robert Bly’s poetry in Spanish in Madrid in autumn 2018.

The award-winning poet Clara Janés was born in Barcelona and holds degrees from the Universities of Navarra and Paris. She has translated Czech and Middle Eastern poetry and is also a novelist, essayist, editor of the Mediterranean and Oriental Poetry Collection, and a member of the Spanish Royal Academy. Her book, Ψ o el jardín […]

Peter Gizzi, born in 1959 in Alma, Michigan, is a poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He has taught at Brown University, Rhode Island, and The University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 2001, he has been a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. For several years, he was […]

Jenny Hamlett has an MA in Creative Writing; her second collection, Playing Alice, is published by IDP.

N.J. Hynes has an MA (with distinction) in Creative and Life writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her collection The Department of Emotional Projections (2014) won the inaugural Live Canon first collection competition. She has a background in anthropology, journalism, art criticism and publishing, and lives and works in London. 

Sue Davies is former lecturer in English Literature. She writes poetry and short stories; her first poetry collection, Blue Water Café, was published by Oversteps in 2014. She is working on a second collection and a fictional memoir.

Nick Makoha is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and a Fellow of The Complete Works in the UK. He won the 2015 Brunel African Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for 2017. In the same year he was also shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. He also won the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize 2016 for his manuscript Resurrection Man. He represented Uganda in […]

Will Harris is a writer of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage, born and based in London. He has worked in schools, led workshops at the Southbank Centre, London, and teaches for The Poetry School. He co-edits 13 Pages and organises The Poetry Inquisition. He is an Assistant Editor at The Rialto and a fellow of The Complete […]

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual Irish poet whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Michael Hartnett Prize, and a Seamus Heaney Fellowship. She frequently participates in cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music, and visual art. Recent/forthcoming commissions include work […]

Paul went hell-for-leather writing poems in his teens, and won a regional youth poetry competition, but then stopped. He has just started to write again in earnest during the last year or so. He has previously trained as a linguist, archaeologist, intelligence analyst, detective, and chef, and now works in public service. He is married, […]

Joseph Butler is a blacksmith and boatbuilder. More recently he trained as a nurse and currently cares for patients in an Oxfordshire hospice. He lives in a narrowboat on the River Thames. 

Jane works as a communications officer for Plymouth City Council. She finds that poetic inspiration can come from anything, including Tom Daley parking outside her house, office diets, iPhones, the news. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry24 and Shooter. She has performed at events in Devon and belongs to a Poetry School group. She […]

Robert Powell was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, and now lives in York, UK. He has published two collections: Harvest of Light (Stone Flower, 2007), and All (Valley Press, 2015), as well as A Small Box of River (2016), a collaborative artist’s book and exhibition with artist Jake Attree. His most recent project is a short film […]

Matt Pitt is a poet and screenwriter. He has previously been published in Ambit and The London Magazine. His debut feature film, Greyhawk, was nominated for the Michael Powell award at the 2014 Edinburgh International Film Festival. He lives and works in Brighton.

Margot Myers lives in Oxford; her poems and flashfiction have had some success in competitions. She has poems published in The Interpreter’s House and The Emma Press anthologies of Dance (2015), Urban Myths and Legends (2016), Aunts (2017), and British Festivals (forthcoming 2018).

Yvonne Reddick’s pamphlet Translating Mountains won the 2017 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and is published by Seren. She won a Northern Writer’s Award in 2016 and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2017. Her book Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her ‘day job’ involves reading Seamus Heaney’s drafts and deciphering Ted Hughes’s terrible handwriting, for a […]

Momtaza Mehri is a poet and essayist. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Poetry London, BBC Radio 4, Buzzfeed, Poetry Society of America and Real Life Mag. She is a Complete Works Fellow and winner of the 2017 Outspoken Page Poetry Prize. Her chapbook suga lump prayer was published in 2017. She also edits Diaspora Drama, a digital […]

Dom Bury lives in Devon where he runs workshops on nature, ecopoetry and the emotional impact of climate change. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales and Best British Poetry. He is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Jerwood/Arvon Mentorship. He won first prize in Magma Poetry Competition and […]

Born in Nigeria in 1984, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist and designer. He is an ambassador for the Ministry of Stories and has published four books of poetry: Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen and #Afterhours, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New […]

Antony Owen is from Coventry, England, with an interest in exploring the consequences of conflicts which he considers are largely overlooked. Author of five poetry collections, his The Nagasaki Elder (V.Press, 2017) was inspired by atomic bomb survivors’ accounts and growing up in Cold War Britain at the peak of nuclear proliferation. His poems have […]

Greta Stoddart was born in Oxfordshire in 1966. Her first collection At Home in the Dark (Anvil) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2002. Her second book, Salvation Jane (Anvil), was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award 2008. She was also shortlisted for […]

Holly Pester is a poet living mostly in London. She is working on her first full collection on bogs and abortivity and is Lecturer in Poetry and Performance at University of Essex.

Lee Young-Ju’s books of poetry include 108th Man (Munhakdongne, 2005), My Dear Older Sister (Minumsa, 2010), and Cold Candies (Moonji, 2014). Her essay ‘How I Wanted to Escape’ was included in the anthology Because I Like You So (Gom, 2013).

O. Flote was born in southern Africa, as were his parents and grandparents. He currently lives in Tasmania.

Thoraya El-Rayyes is a Palestinian-Canadian literary translator and political sociologist. Her translations of contemporary Arabic literature have received awards from the Modern Language Association and the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas. She lives in Amman, Jordan.

Jae Kim lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and teaches fiction writing as a Third-Year Fellow at Washington University, where he recently finished his MFA. His stories have appeared or will appear in NOON, The Collagist and elsewhere.

Jang Su-jin was included in Moonji’s 12th Literature and Intelligence Selected Poets series. Her book of poems is scheduled for release from Moonji in 2017.

Hisham Bustani is an award-winning poet and short-story writer from Jordan. His collections of short fiction include Of Love and Death (2008), The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (2010), and The Perception of Meaning (2012), which was awarded the prestigious Arabic Translation Award from the University of Arkansas in 2014. Acclaimed for his contemporary themes, style, […]

A.F. Harrold is an English poet who writes for both kids and adults. His books for children include the poetry collection Things You Find In A Poet’s Beard (illustrated by Chris Riddell), the very funny Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space (illustrated by Joe Todd-Stanton), and the slightly spooky book The Imaginary […]

Jenny Hill’s first full collection is Voices of the First World War (Undead Tree, 2016). She lives in Whitby and also works as a singer specialising in Early Music and Folk.

Oliver Comins lives and works in west London. His publications include three Templar Poetry pamphlets, the most recent of which, Battling Against the Odds (2016), led to his appointment as National Golf Month Poet for 2017.

Duncan Chambers is a university researcher living in York. He has been writing on and off since the 1980s and his poems have been published in various magazines.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio obtained her MA in Creative Writing in 2012 and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the university of Reading. She lives in Surrey with her family.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His first collection, Far District, came out in 2010 and received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. His latest collection, House of Lords and Commons (Faber), was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award 2016. Other honours include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and […]

Aria Aber was born to Afghan parents in Germany, and now lives and writes in New York, USA.

Sue Johns was born in Penzance and now lives in South London. She began writing and performing as a ‘punk poet’ and is veteran of the London circuit. She has performed at festivals and cabarets around the country as a solo performer and with Dodo Modern Poets, and also writes and performs theatrical monologues. Her […]

Patricia McCaw was born and brought up in Northern Ireland but  has  lived in Edinburgh for many years. After a  career in social work she completed a Masters in Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in many journals and have won several prizes. 

A.P. Fraser has worked in a variety of occupations  in the oil and chemical industries, and in the voluntary and public sector. He has always written poetry, but have never received formal training. He has been successful in several competitions and poetry publications.

Kaye Lee is an Australian who has lived in north London for many years with her Welsh husband. After working in health care for 40 years, firstly as a Therapy Radiographer and then as a nurse, she retired and now spends most of her time doing what she really loves – reading and writing poetry. […]

Widely published and winner of many prizes, Wendy Klein is a retired psychotherapist, born in New York and brought up in California. Since leaving the U.S. in 1964, she has lived in Sweden, France, Germany and England. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s death, her nomadic years as […]

Mary King was a science teacher and started writing on retiring. She had a pamphlet published in 2016 by The Poetry Business and came second in Manchester Cathedral’s Poetry Competition judged by Jo Bell. She works with a poetry group, Keele Poets at Silverdale, lead by Caroline Hawkridge.  

Sarah Barr lives in Dorset and has recently set up a new Poetry Society Stanza group in Wimborne which she hopes local poets will enjoy coming to. She writes poetry and fiction for adults and children and her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including the Bripdort Prize anthologies 2010 and 2016; […]

Bernie Cullen is an artist and poet living and working in North Yorkshire. She studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam, and an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, both, as a mature student, after a varied career in science, as a sign language interpreter, bicycle mechanic and charity founder. Bernie’s work explores our […]

John Gohorry was born Donald Smith in Coventry in 1943. He lectured in Further/Higher Education until retirement in 2006. He has published nine collections of poems, most recently The Age of Saturn (Shoestring 2015) and Impromptus for George Erdmann, with The Good Samaritan, a libretto for a Conjectural Abendmusik 1705 (Lapwing, 2015). His sequence Thirty […]

Sheila Schofield wrote for and edited numerous publications throughout her career in the charity sector. She started writing poetry about 20 years ago and has contributed to several anthologies. She uses poetry extensively in her professional practice; training teachers in creative learning. On moving to Treignac in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France, Sheila became co-founder of Limousin Laureates […]

Isabel was one of the runners-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2017.

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on 28 July 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. His most recent book of poetry was Commotion of the Birds (2016). Other collections include Breezeway (2015), Quick […]

Dai Weina 戴潍娜 is a poet, novelist and playwright based in Beijing. Liang Yujing’s translations of her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Vol 107, No. 2, Summer 2017.

Laura Foley is the author of six poetry collections, including Joy Street, Syringa and Night Ringing. Her poem ‘Gratitude List’ won the Common Good Books poetry competition, judged by Garrison Keillor; ‘Nine Ways of Looking at Light’ won the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, judged by Marge Piercy. She is a palliative care volunteer and […]

Susan E. Holland was born Stoke-on-Trent in 1952, and grew up in Hawick in the Scottish Borders. She lived in London for thirty years, and now lives in Kintyre, Argyll. She has been awarded prizes for both her poetry and fiction; she was a prizewinner in the 2015 Troubadour competition. She has also been longlisted […]

Julie-ann Rowell’s first pamphlet collection, Convergence, published by Brodie Press, won a Poetry Book Society Award. Her first full collection, Letters North (also Brodie Press), was nominated for the Inaugural Michael Murphy Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2011. Her many awards include first prize in the Frogmore Poetry Competition and The New Writer’s […]

Kit Fan’s first collection was Paper Scissors Stone (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). His second, As Slow As Possible (Arc, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Diamond Hill, his debut novel, will be published in 2021

Elaine Feeney is an Irish poet. Her collections Where’s Katie? (2010), The Radio was Gospel (2014) and Rise (2017) are published by Salmon. Her chapbook, Indiscipline, appeared from Maverick Press in 2007. Feeney’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and is widely published. In 2016, Liz Roche Company commissioned Feeney to write […]

Julian Stannard is Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. His most recent collection is What were you thinking? (CB Editions, 2016), earlier collections include Rina’s War (Peterloo Poets, 2001); The Red Zone (Peterloo Poets, 2007); The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli (Salmon, 2011) and The Street of Perfect […]

D.M. Aderibigbe is from Nigeria. He is the author of a chapbook, In Praise of Our Absent Father (Akashic, 2016). He has received numerous fellowships and honours from Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, James Merrill House, OMI International Arts Center, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Foundation and Boston University, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing […]

Allis Hamilton lives in Australian bushland; her poems live in anthologies and journals in Australia and Ireland.

Wayne Holloway-Smith received his PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Brunel University on 2015. He is the author of a pocketbook, Beloved, in case you’ve been wondering (Donut, 2011), and a full-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe, 2017). His pamphlet, I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE WENDING, was published by Test Centre in 2018. He was the […]

Lucy Tunstall’s first collection is The Republic of the Husband (Carcanet, 2014).

Eleanor Hooker has an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. Her debut poetry collection, The Shadow Owner’s Companion (Dedalus), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for Best First Irish Collection from 2012. Her second, A Tug of Blue (Dedalus), was published in 2016, and her third is due in 2021. Her poems […]

Natalie Whittaker’s debut pamphlet Shadow Dogs is recently published by ignition press. Her poems have also appeared in magazines including Poetry News and Southbank Poetry. In 2016 she was commended in the Brittle Star competition and the Plough Poetry Prize. She has also been shortlisted for the Frogmore Prize and the Bridport Prize.

Marina Sanchez lives in North London and works in a local secondary school. Her poems and translations have been widely published in literary journals and international anthologies. She has been a finalist (2009), shortlisted twice (2010) and longlisted (2011) in the Cinnamon Press Writing Awards Poetry Collection competitions. Her pamphlet, Dragon Child (Acumen, 2015), was […]

Patrick Cotter’s publications includes several chapbooks, the verse novella The Misogynist’s Blue Nightmare (Raven Arts Press, 1990) and the full collections, Perplexed Skin (Arlen House 2008) and Making Music (Three Spires Press 2009). No One Knows, a bilingual selection, was published in Macedonia in 2014. His work has been published in London Review of Books, […]

Zhou Zan 周瓒 (also known as Zhou Yaqin) is a leading Chinese poet, translator, playwright and critic. Jennifer Wong, who translated her poems in the Spring 2017 issue of The Poetry Review, is the author of Goldfish (Chameleon Press, 2013). She is currently completing a PhD on place and identity in contemporary Chinese diaspora poetry […]

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle in 1975. He is the author of four acclaimed books of poems: The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006), The Havocs (2012), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Jackself (2016), all published by Picador. Jackself was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize 2016. He teaches at Newcastle University and […]

Ramona Herdman completed a BA and MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her poems have been published in Envoi, Staple, The Rialto, Thumbscrew, Reactions, Pretext and Egg Box Magazine. Her pamphlet will be published by HappenStance in 2017.

Mary Livingstone is the current Fenland Poet Laureate and lives in Ely, where she writes poems, works as a sustainability consultant. She co-edits the magazine The Fenland Reed.

Andre Bagoo’s most recent collection, The City of Dreadful Night, is published by Prote(s)xt. Previous collections include Burn, published by Shearsman, which was longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and Pitch Lake, published by Peepal Tree Press in 2017. He lives in Trinidad.

Fiona Benson won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019 for Vertigo & Ghost (Cape). Her first collection Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014) won the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for a First Full Collection and the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters.

Sujata Bhatt’s most recent books are Collected Poems (PBS Special Commendation, 2013) and Poppies in Translation (PBS Recommendation, 2015). She has received numerous awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and a Cholmondeley Award. In 2014 she was the first recipient of the Mexican International Poetry Prize, Premio Internacional de Poesía Nuevo Siglo de Oro 1914-2014. Her work has been […]

Tara Bergin is from Dublin. Her award winning collection of poems This is Yarrow was published by Carcanet in 2013, and new poems have recently appeared in Granta, Poetry (Chicago), PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and the TLS. She is a PBS Next Generation Poet. Tara wrote her MLitt on the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (in […]

Kavita A. Jindal is author of the poetry collection Raincheck Renewed, published by Chameleon Press. She also writes fiction, with her short story A Flash of Pepper winning the Vintage Books/Foyles Haruki Murakami prize in January 2012. Born in India, she lived and worked in Hong Kong before settling in the UK. She is Senior Editor of the Asia Literary Review.

Evdokia Charalampous  is a Cyprus-born poet. She recently completed her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Portsmouth. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review and The London Magazine. Her reviews of films and exhibition reviews are also published online.

Pam Job is a member of Colchester Stanza group and has been writing poetry for about eight years. She has won awards in several national poetry competitions, winning the Suffolk Poetry prize, the Crabbe Memorial, for the second time this year. She helps run Poetry Wivenhoe, a monthly live poetry event and has co-edited four […]

Penny Ouvry lives in Amersham in Buckinghamshire. She completed a Lancaster University poetry MA in 2014 and has since been published in Artemis, Envoi and two FISH competition anthologies.

Bernadette has been writing poetry for the last 6 years and finds her work greatly enhanced by belonging to groups of fellow poets, including the recently-formed Brum Stanza. Her poetry draws on her experience of being half-English and half-Irish with all the richness and confusion that brings. She has twice won the international section of […]

Janet Lancaster joined The Poetry Society on the recommendation of Roger McGough way back in the 90s, when on an Arvon course at Totleigh Barton. Janet originates from south Wales, but her home is in Rutland. She is a regular member of the South Leicestershire Stanza led by Charles Lauder. Her poem ‘7 Pregnant Silences’ […]

Susan Utting has worked for many years as a poetry tutor, at Reading University and more recently as a freelance. Her poems have been widely published including in The Times, TLS, The Independent, Forward Book of Poetry, The Poetry Review and Poems on the Underground. Following Striptease (Smith/Doorstop) and Houses Without Walls (Two Rivers Press), […]

Con Connell coordinates the Southampton Stanza of The Poetry Society. He is BBC award-winning, and erstwhile poet-in-residence at Southampton FC. He has co-edited three poetry collections, and his work has been heard on Radio 4 and BBC2. His poetry has been described as “…comic, punning…”  by The Guardian, and “…somehow lacks the stirring quality of […]

Jennie Carr lives in West Oxfordshire but has lived in the south and north of England and for a time in New Zealand. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Poetry News, The Cannon’s Mouth, Brittlestar, The Frogmore Papers, Oxford Poetry and The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press 2014). She won […]

David Jones is from Hampshire. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Chichester University and is a retired headteacher.

Jeff Skinner is a retired librarian and trade union rep. His poems have featured in the Morning Star’ s ‘Well Versed’, The Stare’s Nest, Crowsfeet, Clear Poetry, Ground Poetry,  The Open Mouse –  and on a Guernsey bus. He was shortlisted in the 2015 Wells Poetry Competition. He reads with Exeter Poets Uncut.

Fokkina McDonnell is a psychotherapist in private practice. Her poems have been broadcast and published in magazines and anthologies.

John Scrivens was commended in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition adult category in 2016.

Jason Khan was a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2016, 12-18 category.

Katherine Spencer-Davies was a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2016, 12-18 category.

Alannah is highly commended in the Ways to be Wilder Challenge with People Need Nature.

Franny Choi is the author of Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her work has been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry, The Journal, Southern Indiana Review, The Rumpus and others. She is a Project VOICE teaching […]

Amelien is highly commended in the Ways to be Wilder Poetry Challenge, in association with People Need Nature.

Eleanor is a winner in the Ways to be Wilder Poetry Challenge, in association with People Need Nature.

Rebecca Perry’s pamphlet, little armoured (Seren, 2012), won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her first full collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe, 2015), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Rebecca is co-editor of the […]

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, forthcoming 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of […]

Victoria Kennefick won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet for White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015).

Claire Booker is a Brighton-based poet and playwright. Her debut pamphlet Later There Will Be Postcards is out with Green Bottle Press. Her poems have appeared widely, including in Ambit, Magma, the Morning Star, the North, Rialto, the Spectator and on the side of a Guernsey bus. She has been a Poetry Society Members’ Poem […]

Kate Wise has been published in various magazines in print and online, including Poems in Which, Ink Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, Structo and Haverthorn. Her work appeared in Emma Press anthologies in 2015, and will be in a further one in 2016. She is a solicitor, just about manages two children under five, […]

Mariano Peyrou (1971) is a Spanish poet, novelist, musician and lawyer in Social Anthropology. His work has been widely published in Spanish.

Filipa Leal was born in Porto and studied journalism at the University of Westminster in London. She went on to do a MA in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature at the University of Porto and has since worked as a journalist in radio, newspapers and television and organised a series of literary readings and events in […]

Antonella Anedda is an Italian poet who works as a lecturer in linguistics and as a translator from English French and Latin into Italian. Among the authors she has translated into Italian are Ovid, St John Perse, Philippe Jaccottet and Sylvia Plath. As well as publishing several award-winning poetry collections of her own, she has also published […]

Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. Born in Stockholm, he was Scandinavia’s best-known and most influential contemporary poet. His books sell thousands of copies in Sweden, and his work has been translated into over 50 languages, with substantial or complete editions of his work published in over 20 languages. The latest […]

Pia Tafdrup is a Danish poet, writer and a member of The Danish Academy and The European Academy of Poetry. Her honours include: The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, 1999; The Soeren Gyldendal Award, 2005; and The Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize 2006. She has been widely translated into many languages, and her two latest collections in English, translated by David […]

Kyriakos Charalambides was born in Akhna, in the Famagusta District of Cyprus. He studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens. He is the author of nine books of poetry. Three of them were awarded the First State Prize for Poetry (Cyprus). His book Tholos (Dome) was award the Athens Academy Prize (1989) and his collection […]

Jay Hulme was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Damilare Haastrup was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Georgie Smith was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Ruth Awolola was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Tane Stevens was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Abi Cook was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2015, judged by Anthony Anaxagorou.

Keith Douglas was 24 when he was killed during the invasion of Normandy, in 1944. His poems describe with difficult-to-read precision the actions required of a modern soldier, forcing the reader to face the realities of war without offering the moral release of great emotional distress. Douglas acknowledged openly that the First World War poets […]

Welsh poet Alun Lewis was a pacifist by nature, but events in Europe convinced him to enlist. He was troubled by his status as a soldier, and what it meant in terms of his character. His poems are sensitive and lyrical, dealing with loneliness, alienation, love and death. He was strongly influenced by First World […]

Sidney Keyes was born in the same year as Philip Larkin, his contemporary at Oxford. At university, Keyes was the editor of Eight Oxford Poets. Influenced by Yeats, Rilke and the French symbolists, Keyes’ subjective, metaphysical work showed great promise at a very young age. It is mature and reflective: “I am the man who […]

John Jarmain was a poet and artillery officer in WWII, and spent his military career serving in the Western Desert in North Africa. He was killed by a fragment of mortar shell in 1944. John Jarmain is one of the poets who young poets can respond to in our annual Timothy Corsellis Prize. Find out how […]

Miranda Peake is a London based poet and artist. Her poems have been published in Magma, The Rialto and Banshee, and in 2014 her poem ‘Florence’ won the Mslexia Poetry Competition. She works at the Royal Academy of Dance where she is Programme Manager for Step into Dance, a community dance programme for schools in […]

Jonathan Mayman is a retired Solicitor from Chester who has settled out of court for poetry.

A pamphlet of mountaineering poems by David Wilson is published by Smith/Doorstop in spring 2016.

Patrick Mackie’s first collection, Excerpts From the Memoirs Of A Fool, was published by Carcanet in 2001. His new book, The Further Adventures Of The Lives Of The Saints, is published in spring 2016.

Eleanor is a winner in the 2016 Behind the Curtain poetry challenge on Young Poets Network, in partnership with the V&A Museum. She is also the winner of the 2016 ‘Festive Feasts – Eve of St Agnes’ poetry challenge.

Carol Rumens is a poet, playwright and novelist. Her poetry collections include Hex (Bloodaxe, 2002),Blind Spots (Seren, 2008) and De Chirico’s Threads(Seren, 2010). Her next collection, Animal People, is due from Seren in 2016. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. […]

Clive Eastwood is Stanza rep for the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Stanza. He has one full collection, Fly In Red Wine which was published by the National Poetry Foundation.

Janet Dean was born in Barnsley and now lives in York. She works as a coach, facilitator and consultant in the public and voluntary sectors, and had recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at York St John University. As a poet she has been published in print and online magazines and anthologies, and was […]

David Attwooll’s first full collection was The Sound Ladder (Two Rivers Press, 2015). His work appeared in several anthologies, and he was a winner of the 2013 Poetry Business pamphlet prize with Surfacing (smith/doorstop). Ground Work (Black Poplar, 2014) followed, illustrated by Andrew Walton. David worked in publishing and drummed in a street band. David […]

Claire Dyer is a novelist and poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her poetry collection, Eleven Rooms is published by Two Rivers Press. She is working on a further collection for publication in 2016. Her novels,The Moment and The Perfect Affair and her short story Falling for Gatsby are published by Quercus. She has an MA in […]

Charles Lauder Jr was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. His poems have appeared internationally, and his pamphlet Bleeds was published in 2012. He is the Assistant Editor at The Interpreter’s House and he runs The Poetry Society’s South Leicestershire Stanza.

Marilyn Longstaff lives in Darlington and is a member of Vane Women, a writing performing and publishing collective (www.vanewomen.co.uk). In 2003 she received a Northern Promise Award, and in 2005 completed her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. In 2011 she was one of the three featured poets in New Writing North’s Read Regional […]

Marion Tracy lives in Brighton. She has an MA in English Literature and taught in Further Education Colleges. She has been writing her own poetry now for eight years and had a pamphlet Giant in the Doorway out with Happenstance in 2012.

Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury and now lives in South Devon. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. His third collection Kate was published in May 2015. He was the 2012 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, and is a 2013 Hawthornden Fellow. He is also chair of the Dartmoor […]

Caroline Price is a violinist and teacher living in Kent; her most recent collection is Wishbone (Shoestring Press, 2008).

Victoria Gatehouse is a poet and medical researcher. Her work has been published in many magazines including The North, Magma, The Rialto and Mslexia. Competition wins include Iklley, Otley and PENfro. Victoria’s pamphlet, The Mechanics of Love, published by smith|doorstop, is a Laureate’s Choice for 2019.

Isabel Bermudez was born in Colombia and grew up in London. Educated at King’s College Cambridge and Salford University, she has worked as a documentary film-maker and a schoolteacher. She lived and worked in television in Colombo, Sri Lanka 1993-1995 and in Bogota, Colombia 1998-2001. She is currently a peripatetic tutor of French, Spanish and […]

Victoria Grigg teaches English in south London. Her poems have appeared in Magma and The Warwick Review.

Lydia Harris’s poems have been published in The North, The Rialto and Magma. Her first pamphlet, Glad not to be the Corpse, was published by Smiths Knoll in 2012.

Nairn Kennedy lives in Yorkshire, has been published in Ambit, and has twice been shortlisted in the Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Competition.

Krystyna Milobedzka (b. 1932) is a Polish poet, and a scholar and author of children’s plays. She has published twelve collections of poetry.

Adélia Prado (b. 1935) is a Brazilian poet and teacher. She has published more than eight volumes of poetry.

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) was a German poet who lived and worked in East Germany, and then, after political persecution, the West. She published ten collections of poetry.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a German playwright, poet and theatre director.

Alan Buckley has contributed a poem to our Waterlines project.

Megan Watkins has contributed a poem to our Waterlines project.

Sarah Watkinson has contributed a poem to our Waterlines project.

Angus is a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2015.

Georgina is a runner-up in the 12-18 category of the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2015. 

Loe is a winner in the August challenge to create poems in contrast.

Samah is a winner in the 2015 August challenge to create poems in contrast.

Elian is a winner August challenge to create a poem from a character. 

Soyla is a winner in the 2015 August challenge to create a poem from a character.

Maia is a winner in the 2015 August challenge to create a poem from a character.

Katharina is the runner-up in the 2015 Timothy Corsellis Prize.

Charlotte is a commended poet in the 2015 Timothy Corsellis Prize.

Colette is a commended poet in the secondary category of the Agincourt 600 Poetry Competition. Colette is also a winner of the Christina Broom & the Suffragettes writing challenge.  

Sophie is a winner in our Christina Broom and the Suffragettes writing challenge.

Rhiannon is a winner in our Christina Broom and the Suffragettes writing challenge and in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2015.

Lauren is a winner in our Christina Broom and the Suffragettes writing challenge, run in association with the Musuem of London.

Jamie is a runner-up of the mini competition Become a Literary Translator, run in collaboration with the British Council.

Nirankar is a runner-up in the mini competition Become a Literary Translator, run in collaboration with the British Council.

Jenny Grimes is a winner in the Postcard Poems Challenge 2011.

Ankita Sexton is a winner of the Song Writing challenge on the Young Poets Network.

Madeleine Wynne was one of the runners up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition in 2014. The poem was inspired by ‘Sea Slumber’ from Elgar’s Sea Pictures. As we help publicize the competition on Young Poets Network, we thought it would be lovely to post the winning poems here as well. Congratulations, Madeleine!

James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 8th December 1943. He was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award. His Selected Poems, published 1991, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the William Carlos Williams award. He was a professor […]

Padraig Regan lives in Belfast where he is currently studying for an MA at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University. He is the author of two pamphlets, Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017) and Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016).

Sara Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and was a 2010-2012 Stegner fellow at Stanford. She is the author of 1996 (House of Anansi, 2013) and the forthcoming I Become a Delight to My Enemies (Strange Light, 2019).

Maura Dooley is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Her collections include Life Under Water (Bloodaxe, 2008) and Sound Barrier: Poems […]

In 2013 Henry Israeli was shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation for his translation of poems in Haywire: New & Selected Poems by Luljeta Lleshanaku. Hear Luljeta Lleshanaku read some poems from the collection in English, and read ‘The Madwoman’s Roof’.

Toon Tellegen was born in 1941 on one of the islands in the south-west of the Netherlands. He is one of the best-known Dutch writers, with a long list of awards to his name. In 2007 he received two major prizes for his entire oeuvre. He considers himself in the first place a poet and […]

Marianne Burton’s pamphlet The Devil’s Cut was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her collection She Inserts The Key (Seren) was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize 2013. Her poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, the TLS, Independent, Guardian and Sunday Times, and been featured on Radio Four’s Poetry Please. She has […]

Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow in 1953. He is widely published in magazines and anthologies.

Meredith was a winner of the Poetry News Members’ Poems Competition on the theme of ‘Windows’, judged by Sue Hubbard. She was also a winner of the BBC Proms Poetry Competition 2017.

Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915) was already a famous writer when he enlisted within weeks of the outbreak of the First World War. Serving with the Royal Naval Division, he died of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite while travelling to Gallipoli in April 1915. Once described as “the handsomest young man in England”, […]

Gina Wilson is a poet and novelist for young adults and children, and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Kurt Maschler Award, the Smarties Prize and the Bisto Book of the Year. Her pamphlet Scissors, Paper, Stone was published by HappenStance in 2010. Her second pamphlet, It Was and It Wasn’t, was published in […]

Eliot North is a doctor, medical educator and writer who lives and works in the North East of England. The poem ‘The Crab Man’ was written and submitted as part of her Creative Writing PostGrad Certificate completed at Newcastle University in 2014. She won the EuroStemCell Creative Non-Fiction Poetry competition in 2013, was commended for […]

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Annie Freud is the daughter of the painter, Lucian Freud. Her maternal grandfather was the sculptor, Sir Jacob Epstein, and her great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud. She grew up in London and graduated in English and European Literature at the University of Warwick. Her pamphlet, A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose, was published by Donut Press […]

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 2000.

Winners of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999 and 2000.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets 0f 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature.

John has been writing poetry for the last five years, but has been an avid reader for much longer. He lives in a small village in the Cambridgeshire fens with his wife and two teenage sons.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998 and 1999.

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998 and 1999.

John Elinger is an award-winning poet and the nom de plume of Sir Christopher Ball, sometime Warden of Keble College, Oxford. He was also the first chancellor of the University of Derby. He was knighted in 1987 for services to education, and lives in Oxford. With Katherine Shock he produced That Sweet City: Visions of […]

Anne Stewart was selected as one of the “Ten Hallam Poets” in 2005 and appeared in the anthology published by Mews Press (eds. Sean O’Brien, Steven Earnshaw and EA Markham). In 2008, she won the Bridport Prize for her sonnet, Still Water, Orange, Apple, Tea. Her first collection was The Janus Hour (Oversteps Books, 2010). […]

Winner of the Simon Elvin Young Poets of 1998 and 1999.

Christopher North’s poetry has won many prizes. His first pamphlet collection A Mesh of Wires was short-listed for the Forward Prize in 1999. His first full collection Explaining the Circumstances was published in 2010, followed by a bilingual joint collection Al Otro Lado del Aguilar in 2011 and a second full collection The Night Surveyor in […]

Katrina Naomi’s first full collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake was published by Templar Poetry in November 2009. Originally from Margate, she now lives in south London. www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

Having been brought up in Manchester, Yorkshire and Tyneside, Jacky studied English at Durham University before working in Zambia, Kent, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Exeter. Now that her son and daughter have left home, she is enjoying being a student again at Exeter University, supervised by the poet, Andy Brown. Her PhD provides an exciting opportunity […]

Maggie Butt has published five poetry collections and a novel. She’s an ex-journalist and BBC TV producer who’s taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 26 years and is now a Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of Kent. Her most recent poetry collection Degrees of Twilight (The London Magazine, 2015) follows her illustrated, […]

Sudeep’s collections include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Prayer Flag, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Ladakh, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor). Blue Nude: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1979-2014 (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) is forthcoming. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta),Language […]

Gareth Writer-Davies won the Prole Laureate Poetry Competition in 2017. He’s previously been Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition, the Welsh Poetry Competition and the Sherborne Open Poetry Competition. Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Erbacce Prize. His pamphlet Bodies, was published in 2015  through Indigo Dreams and his next pamphlet Cry Baby is […]

Jane Kite lives in Otley, West Yorkshire. She is joint managing editor of Otley Word Feast Press. She was commended in The Poetry Society’s 2013 Stanza Poetry Competition on the theme of ‘Drought’, judged by Neil Rollinson.

Julie Corbett lives in Hull and her chap book On the Humber is available from www.foldedword.com. An active member of the collective Women of Words she has read Beverley and Bridlington Literature Festivals and has received commissions for poetry performances at Humbermouth Literature Festival and the BBC’s Contains Strong Language. Her poems have been published in several poetry […]

Olivia Dawson lives near Lisbon and has set up a Stanza group in the Lisbon area. Recent poems have been published in Magma, in Paper Swans Press Anthology The Chronicles of Eve and online at And Other Poems.

Chris Bridge was born in Hull in 1947. Since graduating from Nottingham University he has had two parallel careers as teacher and writer. In the first he has been an English teacher for 40 years and a Headteacher for 17 of those years. He has also been an educational consultant working mostly with schools in […]

Brian Clark has previously worked in BBC TV in production and as a newspaper and magazine journalist. He has won numerous prizes and commendations for his poetry in competitions including Ledbury, Barnet, Segora and Poetry on the Lake. His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in various anthologies. He is The […]

Will Kemp studied at Cambridge and UEA, and has lived in Canada, Holland and New Zealand. He now lives in North Yorkshire, where he works as a planner assessing the environmental impacts of major developments. Will has been highly placed in several national competitions, and won the Keats-Shelley Prize, Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award and […]

Jane Lovell is an award-winning poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. Her latest collection This Tilting Earth is published by Seren. Jane also writes for Dark Mountain and Elementum Journal. She is Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. Her new collection ‘God of Lost Ways’ is forthcoming from Indigo […]

David Van-Cauter lives and writes in Hitchin, Herts. He was recently commended in the Café Writers Commission for his proposed pamphlet J. This is the second year running he has been commended in the Stanza competition. He is a personal tutor and editor. He loves board games, music, cats and being spontaneous. He was MC for […]

John Levett was joint winner of the 1991 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘A Shrunken Head’. His latest collection is The Nick of Time published by Shoestring Press in 2014.

Charlie Druce was commended in the 2006 National Poetry Competition.

John Daniel is a poet and artist. He was commended in the 2006 National Poetry Competition. His collection, Skinning the Bull, was published by Oversteps in 2012.

Linda Chase was an American poet who lived in the UK for over 40 years and set up the Manchester branch of the Poetry School. She was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition. Her last published collection was Not Many Love Poems (Carcanet, 2011). She died in 2011.

Ruth Valentine was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition. Her latest collection is On the Saltmarsh (Smokestack, 2012).

Susannah Hart’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018 and her poem ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’ won first prize in the 2019 National Poetry […]