Rebecca Goss has described poetry as ‘an invitation to look very closely at something’, and her refined, spare style certainly supports this idea; as Val McDermid has written, ‘[her] language is precise and evocative, the images sharp as a photograph’.

Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018. Rebecca’s third full-length collection, Girl, was published with Carcanet in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019 and Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, 2019. She is the winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize 2022. Her latest collection, Latch, set in Suffolk, was published with Carcanet in 2023. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD by Publication from the University of East Anglia. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge 2020-22 and at the University of Suffolk 2022-23.

Goss’s early collections are characterised by a candid engagement with the life of the body – an apparent plain-speaking that succeeds in delivering what we might consider to be some of the hardest or most unsayable things. This may be most evident in her second collection, a wrenching series of poems written in the aftermath of the death of Goss’s daughter, Ella, at sixteen months, from Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare heart condition.  Though these are poems of mourning, they remain fiercely attached to life, to the ways in which the needs of the body (whether grieving or dying) assert themselves, the way a body leaves its mark on the world. As the Guardian review of the collection noted, ‘For all its anguish, this is not a collection that succumbs to despair’; the final poems in the book are addressed to Goss’s second daughter, Molly, ushering in a new, more hopeful chapter: ‘lets head for your undiscovered life, / your mother’s ready now, let’s run’.