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 He’s also written five (unpublished) novels since 1998, but returned full-time to poetry at the beginning of 2016.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.

Jo Burns has won the Magma Poetry Prize, Irish Writers Festival (Los Gatos) Poetry Prize and the New Irish Writing Prize in Germany, and has been shortlisted for numerous awards. Her first collection White Horses was published by Turas Press, Dublin, in 2018.

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 is the author of two poetry collections from Copper Canyon, Factory of Tears and Collected Body. Her new book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is forthcoming from FSG in 2020.

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.

Joyce Chen is one of two runners-up in the 12-18 category of 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 is the 2019/2020 Young People’s Laureate for London. She 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 and BUREAU. […]

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 is a creative writing tutor. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and she is working on a first collection.

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 and her debut poetry pamphlet is Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, PN Review and elsewhere. Gail was co-winner of the Ink Sweat & Tears Pamphlet Competition 2017 and will publish a second pamphlet in 2019, exploring the interaction between parenthood and queerness. Its […]

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 Yorkshire but now lives in Ledbury. She was a late-starter, but has a Diploma in CW from the Open University and a Masters from the University of Gloucestershire, with a final thesis on ‘Ekphrasis as Translation’. Her first collection, Scumbled (Cinnamon), was published in 2015 and her poems have appeared in […]

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 was joint runner-up in the Poetry School/Pighog Pamphlet Competition (2014). Her pamphlet, The Fire Station, appeared from Telltale Press in 2015. She has also published a selection of her literary criticism.

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 book was Paper Scissors Stone (Hong Kong University Press, 2011); he is completing his second, As Slow As Possible.

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 will be published in 2020. Her […]

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.

Issy Prior-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 […]

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 returned to writing poems four years ago, since when he has won a variety of prizes and commendations 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 currently preparing his first collection in the hope of its […]

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 has been widely published in journals and anthologies. She won the Flambard Prize in 2015 and has been shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Prize, the Periplum Book Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and the Wisehouse International Poetry Prize. One Tree has been recently published by Night River Wood. Metastatic is published by Against the Grain Poetry Press, and Forbidden is a […]

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).

Simon Currie was born in Leeds in 1938. He became a consultant neurologist there. After Open University courses on literature and the Enlightenment, he gained a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University on medical interaction in colonial India and West Indies. He is a member of the Beehive Poets, Bradford, and of the Pennine Poets. He […]

Sarah James (also published as Sarah Leavesley) is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. She has been the Poetry Society’s Worcestershire Stanza rep since shortly after the Stanza started in 2009. She also runs V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint. Her website is at http://www.sarah-james.co.uk. 

Davina (D A) Prince has been a Poetry Society Member for many years and is also a member of the South Leicestershire Stanza. Her poem ‘Jack‘ was a runner-up in The Poetry Society’s Stanza Poetry Competition in 2010, judged by Sheenagh Pugh, and she has been regularly published in Poetry News.  D A Prince’s first […]

David Briggs is a poet and teacher. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition. His first collection, The Method Men, was published in 2010 by Salt and his latest collection is Rain Rider (Salt, 2013).

Caroline Cook has contributed a poem to our Waterlines project.

Isabella Mead lives in Buckinghamshire with Ama the cat. She holds a Master’s in History of Art and is currently studying for a degree in French, Italian and Spanish. A former secondary English teacher in East London, she worked for two years as a teacher trainer in a rural Rwandan village before working as Head […]

Hilary Jupp was born in the Erewash Valley in South Derbyshire, She now lives in a village in South East Cornwall where the pace of walking and the stillness of embroidery help the process of her writing. Her poems have appeared in Equinox, Smiths Knoll, The Rialto, andPoetry News (the latter of which went on […]

Patricia Ace’s collection, Fabulous Beast, was published by Freight Books in 2013.

Helen Jagger’s poems have been published in the UK, US and Australia.  She runs The Poetry Society’s North Cornwall Stanza, many poetry workshops and has facilitated the Indian King Poets. She was poet in residence at Pencarrow from 2010 – 2012 and worked alongside a photographer and painter on The Bodmin Moor Project. In 2014 she worked with the Falmouth Poetry […]

Lesley Saunders has published many collections, most recently Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press); A Part of the Main, a joint publication with Philip Gross and Valerie Price, is forthcoming this autumn from Mulfran Press. Previous collections include: The Dark Larder (Corridor Press, 1997); Christina the Astonishing, with Jane Draycott and Peter Hay (Two Rivers Press, 1998); […]

Holly Hopkins lives and works in London. Her debut pamphlet, Soon Every House Will Have One, won the 2014 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Holly has received an Eric Gregory Award (2011) and a Hawthornden Fellowship (2016). Holly manages the Forward Prizes for Poetry and is an assistant editor of […]

Swithun won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009 and has been published in magazines including Acumen, the London Magazine and PN Review. He spent a year as the Deputy Editor of Northern Exposure, the Arts Council of England’s Yorkshire-based arts magazine and now works at The Poetry Library. Swithun founded Poetry Digest, an edible poetry […]

Bridget writes young adult fiction as B.R. Collins. Her novels include The Traitor Game (which won the 2009 Branford Boase Award) and The Broken Road. Bridget was of the Poetry Society’s Young Poets of the Year in 1999.

Sue Leigh studied for a PhD in poetry at Aberystwyth University and currently teaches creative writing part-time at Rewley House, Oxford University’s department for continuing education. She has been published in numerous magazines and journals including Oxford Magazine, Planet, Poetry News, Templar Poetry Pamphlet 2011, The Times Literary Supplement and The Warwick Review. Her poems […]

Copland Smith is a Manchester based poet, musician and playwright. He has been commended three times in the National Poetry Competition.

An Eric Gregory Award-winner, Sue Butler is the author of a number of poetry collections including Learning to Improvise (Rockingham) and Arson (Happenstance). She was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Reflection, July 1938’.

Pauline Keith is a Lancaster based poet who received a commendation in the 2007 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Missing’.

Rachel A. Dilworth is an American poet who received a commendation in the 2007 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Body Sonnets VIII: The Magdalen’. Her first manuscript, The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems of the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland, was chosen  as the winner of the 2008 Akron Poetry Prize. It was published by the […]

Frank Dux was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition for his poem ‘Coming Down to Drink’.

Patrick Brandon was commended in the 2007 National Poetry Competition for his poem ‘Flat Dad’. His first poetry collection, A Republic of Linen, was published by Bloodaxe in 2009.

David Kennedy is a poet and editor. He also reviews regularly for magazines such as The Poetry Review, PN Review and Stand. He has published three of his own poetry collections with Salt. He won third prize in the 2007 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Encore, Mr Fox!’.

Rosemary Norman won 2nd prize in the 2007 National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘The Hairdresser from Beirut’. She has published two full collections; Threats & Promises (Iron Press, 1991) and Italics (Shoestring Press, 2010).

Rhian Gallagher was placed third in the 2001 National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘Embrace’.

Ann Drysdale received second prize in the 2001 National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘New Fruit’. Her collections include Backwork (Peterloo Poets, 2002) and Quaintness and Other Offences (Cinnamon, 2009).

James Manlow won second prize in the 2003 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Lazy Maid’. He was appointed as Bournemouth’s first poet laureate in 2013 and his debut poetry collection, When We Were Slugs, was published in 2014 by Parkgate Press.

David Grubb received 3rd prize in the 2006 National Poetry Competition for his poem ‘Bud Fields and His World’. His poetry collections include It Comes with a Bit of Song (Salt, 2007) and Ways of Looking, a pamphlet published by Smith/Doorstop in 2013.

John Latham is a writer, poet and playwright who has had several of his plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His poetry collections include All-Clear (Peterloo Poets, 1990) and Sailor Boy (The Collective Press, 2006). He was awarded second prize in the 2006 National Poetry Competition for his poem ‘From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks On […]

Michael Hulse is a poet, critic and translator. Since 2002 he has taught poetry and comparative literature at the University of Warwick where he also established The Warwick Review in 2007. He won the inaugural National Poetry Competition in 1978 with his poem ‘Dole Queue’. Other awards include an Eric Gregory Award in 1980 and […]

Medbh McGuckian is a poet from Northern Ireland whose poem ‘The Flitting’ won first prize in the 1979 National Poetry Competition. Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets published in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. She went on to publish many collections including The Flower Master (1982) which […]

Tony Harrison is a poet, playwright and translator. Many of his works have been performed at the Royal National Theatre and he is known for controversial works such as his poem ‘V’, as well as versions of dramatic works. He has won numerous awards over the years including the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1992 […]

James Berry is a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. He won the 1981 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Fantasy of an African Boy’. He has written several volumes of poetry for children, winning awards along the way such as the Smarties Prize in 1987 for A Thief in the Village […]

Ibukun Badmus was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2014, judged by Kate Tempest.

Abdullah Alselami was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam in 2014, judged by Kate Tempest.

Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright who was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 2009. She is one of the UK’s most well-known and successful contemporary poets with numerous poetry collections to her name, including Standing Female Nude (1985), Mean Time (1993), The World’s Wife (1999) and Rapture (2005). She has won many […]

Tony Curtis won the 1984 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939’. He has published several collections of poetry, the latest of which is Crossing Over (Seren, 2007).

Martin Reed won the 1988 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Widow’s Dream’.

William Scammell won the 1989 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘A World Elsewhere’. He published several poetry collections during his lifetime, the last of which was All Set to Fall Off the Edge of the World (1998, Flambard). He died in 2000.

Nick Rice won the 1990 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Room Service’.

Sam Gardiner (1936-2016) won the 1993 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Protestant Windows’. The collection Protestant Windows appeared in 2000, followed by The Picture Never Taken (2004), The Night Ships (2007) and The Morning After (2010). David Wheatley paid tribute to Sam in 2016.

Beatrice Garland won the 2001 National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘undressing’. Her first poetry collection, The Invention of Fireworks, was published in 2013 by Templar and was shortlisted among the Forward Prizes for the Felix Dennis Prize awarded to the best first collection.

Jon Sait won the 2004 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘Homeland’.

Mike Barlow won the 2006 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Third Wife’. He won the Ledbury Competition in 2005 and the Amnesty International competition in 2002. His first collection, Living on the Difference, won the Poetry Business competition in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh prize. His latest collection is Charmed […]

Suzanne has been writing poetry for a number of years, and lectures in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her first poetry collection, The Barking Thing, was published by Bloodaxe in 2007. She won the Poetry Society’s inaugural Anne Born Prize in 2013, and is working on her second collection.

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. Kei writes across a range of genres: novels, books of short stories, essays and poetry. His 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet), won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His poetry has also been shortlisted for awards such as the Jonathan Llewelyn Ryhs Prize, […]

Daisy Behagg’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, The North and Ambit. She won the Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2013 and her debut pamphlet, Cockpit Syndrome was published by Templar Poetry. She teaches creative writing and is Poetry Editor of the journal New Linear Perspectives. She lives in Brighton.

Amy Key’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and Poetry magazine. Her debut collection Luxe was published by Salt in 2013. She is the editor of Best Friends Forever, poems on female friendship (The Emma Press, 2014) and the online journal Poems in Which.

Neetha Kunaratnam was born and grew up in London, of Tamil Sri Lankan parents, but has lived in both Japan and France – and speaks French, German and Spanish.

Michael Murphy (1965-2009) won The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 for his poem ‘An Idea of Order’. Several further poems appeared in The Poetry Review, including ‘Turf’. His Collected Poems was published posthumously by Shoestring Press in 2009.  Gwyneth Lewis wrote: “Michael Murphy’s poetry is an heroic body of work – elegant, unwavering […]

Anna Wrigley won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2000 for her poem ‘Beloved Daughter’.

James Harpur has had five books of poetry published by Anvil Press, including his latest, Angels and Harvesters (2012), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Dark Age (2007) won the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award. Other prizes and bursaries include the National Poetry Competition 1995, two Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries, a Society of […]

Carolyn Forché is Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC, co-editor of the anthologies Against Forgetting (Norton, 1993) and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (Norton, 2014). Her collections include Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003) and The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), which […]

Poet, Jo Bell was the inaugural Canal Laureate for the Canal & River Trust and The Poetry Society from 2013-2015. Jo Bell was formerly an industrial archaeologist specialising in industrial remains like mines, railways… and canals. She discovered historic narrowboats and began writing poetry seriously at about the same time; and her career has since […]

Paul Stephenson currently lives in Paris. He recently completed the Arvon/Jerwood mentoring scheme and was one of 2014’s Aldeburgh Eight. He was published in the Poetry Society’s Poetry News as a winner of the Members’ Poems Competition on the themes of ‘Gold’ and ‘The Tiny World’. He was a Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Prize […]

Sharon Black’s collection, To Know Bedrock, was published by Pindrop Press in 2011. Her second, The Art of Egg, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2015. She was a winner in the Poetry News Members’ Poems Competition on the theme of ‘Gold’. Sharon is from Scotland but now lives in the south of France. […]

After taking her degree in Swedish and English Literature at St David’s University College, Lampeter, Nicola Mayne taught English abroad and in the UK for some years before settling down again to the mudflats, Iron Age Forts and hills of Somerset where she writes poetry, learns languages for fun and illustrates things for her patient children […]

Anna Kisby lives in Devon. Her poetry has been placed in competitions and published in magazines including Poetry News, Mslexia, Orbis, Seam and South Bank Poetry. She was the winner of the New Writer poetry competition 2011. Her debut pamphlet is published with Against the Grain Press in October 2017.

Jan Bay-Petersen is a New Zealander who came to Cambridge to do a Ph.D., and spent twenty years at an international agricultural centre in Taiwan. She worked with Asian scientists who collected technical information that could be used on small farms, and distributed it free of charge. She began writing poetry when she retired and […]

Angela Stoner lives in Cornwall. She runs workshops which explore the therapeutic power of writing. She has two published books Once in a Blue Moon (Fal publications) and a collection of poetry Weight and Flight (Oversteps Books). She finds the support and insight of groups such as Stanza invaluable.  She was the winner of the […]

Michael Swan was the winner of the Stanza Poetry Competition 2010.

Julie Lumsden won The Poetry Society’s Stanza Poetry Competition in 2009 with ‘Fancy Man’ and her poems have also been published in Poetry News. Her pamphlet True Crime was published by Shoestring Press and she also has two previous pamphlets, Naked by Profession (Leafe Press, 2000) and Sixteen Poems (Open House Editions, 2004).

Richard Goodson is a poet, creative writing teacher and runs The Poetry Society’s Nottingham Stanza. He was winner of our 2008 Stanza Poetry Competition with ‘Daniel Craig: The Screensaver’, which was subsequently published in the Penguin Poetry of Sex, edited by Sophie Hannah. He co-edited Heroes: From Mum to Mandela (Five Leaves, November 2012), an anthology […]

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 and is now Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Anne’s College. He is the author of two collections of poems, published by Carcanet, a novel and several academic books about French literature and modern poetry. […]

Hélène Dorion was born in 1958 in Québec City, and now lives in Montreal. She studied philosophy at the University of Laval, and published her first collection of poems in 1983. Since then her prolific oeuvre – poetry, fiction, essays, and livres d’artistes – has constituted one of modern Quebecois literature’s major achievements. She is […]

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was an influential French poet and adventurer who wrote most of his poems as a teen, stopping at age 21.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé […]

Kristiina Ehin is one of Estonia’s leading poets and is known throughout Europe for her poetry and short stories. She has an MA in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from the University of Tartu, and folklore plays a significant role in her work. In her native Estonian she has to date published six volumes of poetry, […]

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised […]

Luljeta Lleshanakuwas born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has […]

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18th March 1842, the son of Numa Mallarmé (1805-1863) and Élisabeth Desmolins (1819-1847). He had one sister, Maria (1844-1857). After a short spell in the Registry Office at Sens, he trained as a teacher of English, working at schools in Tournon, Besançon and Avbignon before settling in Paris […]

Peter Manson lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include Between Cup and Lip (Miami University Press), For the Good of Liars and Adjunct: an Undigest (both from Barque Press) and Poems of Frank Rupture. He was shortlisted for the Poetry Society’s Popescu Prize 2013 for his translation of The Poems in Verse by Stéphane Mallarmé (Miami University Press). Read ‘The Tomb of Edgar […]

Ciaran Carson (9 October 1948 – 6 October 2019) was born in Belfast and studied English at Queen’s University. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, with responsibility for Traditional Music and, subsequently, Literature. In October 2003 he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney […]

Denise Bennett has an MA in creative writing (poetry) and teaches FE classes in this subject. She won the Havant Literary Festival poetry competition in 2014 and the Hastings Poetry Competition in 2013, as well as winning the inaugural Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society in 2004. Her work has appeared in various poetry […]

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and studied English and American literature at Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne universities. She resumed writing after a thirteen year interval (which started in the early nineties following a move to Hong Kong) and ‘Loudness’, which won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2005, was the first of […]

Keith Chandler was born and educated in Northern Nigeria and worked as a secondary school teacher in Liverpool, London and Norfolk. He lives in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. Since being selected for Ten English Poets (Carcanet) in 1977, his poetry has been published in four collections: Kett’s Rebellion (Carcanet, 1982), A Passing Trade (1991), A Different Kind […]

Matt Barnard has had poems published in numerous magazines, including Acumen, London Magazine, Magma, Other Poetry and Outposts. He featured in the Poetry School’s 2004 anthology Entering the Tapestry and won The Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize with his poem ‘The Sore Thumb’ in 2006. His poems ‘The Gift’ and ‘Hey Presto’ were also selected […]

Dorothy Pope began writing at the age of fifty-three having taken early retirement from teaching. She is author of The Fourth Man – A Selection of Poems (self-published) and The Summerhouse Poems. She teaches English to individual pupils in a garden shed at her Harrow on the Hill home. Disabled, married (to The Fourth Man) […]

Gill Learner was born in 1939 near Birmingham and now lives in Reading. Having worked in the printing trade, she then taught printing studies. Since beginning to write poetry in 2001 she has won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2008 and the Buxton poetry competition (2011). Her first collection, The Agister’s Experiment, (2011) […]

Emma Danes’ pamphlet Dress of Shadows was a winner in the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2012/13. Her poems have won the Hamish Canham Prize and the Poetry Society Stanza Poetry Competition, and been published in anthologies and magazines including CAST: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets (Smith|Doorstop) and The Best British […]

Joan Michelson’s publications include The Family Kitchen, The Finishing Line Press, USA, 2018; Landing Stage, prize publication, SPM Publishers UK, 2017;  Bloomvale Home, Original Plus Books, UK, 2016; Toward The Heliopause, Poetic Matrix Press, USA 2011. Her writing has been selected for British Council and Arts Council anthologies of New Writing. She was Crouch End […]

Suzanna Fitzpatrick has been published in Brittle Star, The Frogmore Papers, Fuselit, The Interpreter’s House, HQ, Mslexia, The North, Poetry News, South, and South Bank Poetry. She was commended in the 2013 Hippocrates Prize and the 2012 Poetry London and 2011 South Bank Poetry competitions, came second in the 2010 Buxton Competition, and has been shortlisted for […]

Haf Davies is a former Foyle Young Poet and participant in the Hands across the border poetry project.

Pauline Stainer was commissioned by the Churches Conservation Trust and the Poetry Society to write a celebratory poem to mark the CCT’s 40th anniversary in 2008. She is an acclaimed English poet. She was born in the industrial district of Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1941. She later left the city to attend St Anne’s College, Oxford, […]

Leontia Flynn is a Belfast poet whose previous collections include These Days, a winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and Drives which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She was awarded the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize in 2013.

Sarah Westcott’s collection Slant Light is published by Pavilion Poetry. Her poems have appeared in magazines including The Poetry Review and Magma, and on beermats, billboards and the side of buses. Recent awards are the London Magazine poetry prize and the Manchester Cathedral prize.  www.sarahwestcott.co.uk

David Hart has won several major prizes, including the National Poetry Competition 1994 and the Common Ground/Blue Nose Poets Field Days competition. His poems were published in 1999 as Setting the poem to words (Five Seasons Press). Poet in Residence at Worcester Cathedral in 1998-99, David Hart set out to investigate through poetry, the spiritual. […]

Helen Farish was born in Cumbria in 1962, where she now lives. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-05). She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Hampshire. She lectures at […]

Deryn Rees-Jones is an Anglo Welsh poet and critic. She undertook doctoral research on women poets at Birkbeck College, London, and now lectures at Liverpool University. She has published several collections of poetry including The Memory Tray (Seren, 1994), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and more recently Burying the Wren (Seren, […]

Liz Lochhead is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. She was the Makar (the National Poet of Scotland) between 2011 and 2016.

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh Poet (1914 – 1953) who became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death in New York. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet”. He is particularly known for his play Under Milk Wood and his […]

Paul was born in Northwich, Cheshire, in March 1948. He is the author of many poetry collections, the most recent of which is Voting for Spring (Smith Doorstop, 2010).

Tom Lowenstein was born in 1941. He is the author of many collections of poetry, the most recent of which is, From Culbone Wood – In Xanadu (Shearsman, 2013).

Keith Howden is the author of many collections of poetry, the most recent of which is, Barlow Agonistes (Lulu, 2014).