George Elliott Clarke is a skillful, candid writer whose output incorporates poetry, screenplays, opera libretti and verse drama. His poems are highly politically engaged, addressing issues, including those pertaining to race and identity, in ways that are both collective and…

Patience Agbabi is a poet much celebrated for paying equal homage to literature and performance. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, her work moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page…

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1962; he grew up there, and in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the U.S.A., Hong Kong, Bahrain and the UK. He holds a B.A. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and studied…

Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942) is a poet whose work combines the political and the personal, the traditional and the radical, to startling effect. She is a New Yorker, born in the Bronx to Jewish parents who were the first in…

Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013) was the eldest child of nine born to a farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He won a scholarship to St Columb’s College, Derry, beginning an academic career that would lead, through Queen’s University…