Born in Barbados, where she still resides, Esther Phillips graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami in 1999, winning the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry thesis. In February…

Born in Welwyn Garden City, England, to Welsh parents in 1962, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied poetry and theatre with Derek Walcott. He moved to the USA in 1996, teaching first at…

Born in Birmingham, England, Cilla McQueen moved to New Zealand when she was four years old. She ranks amongst the finest poets of her generation, with honours which include three New Zealand Book Awards, the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for…

Of Rotuman, Tongan and European/Pakeha ancestry, David Eggleton was raised in Auckland and Fiji. As well as his poetry, Eggleton writes extensively on New Zealand art and music, edits New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary journal, Landfall and is an acclaimed literary…

The poems that made Wilfred Owen famous were mostly published after his death in action a week before the end of the First World War. Powerfully influenced by Keats and Shelley, he experimented with verse from childhood, but found his…

Gerard Hopkins was born in 1844, went to Highgate School and won a scholarship to Balliol College Oxford where he took a double first in Classics. He then entered the Society of Jesus and, feeling that writing poetry was too…

Andrew Johnston is the son of an English Professor, has had a successful career as a professional journalist including working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune for many years, and now lives in France where he runs a…

John Montague (b.1929, New York), the author of many books of poetry, stories, memoirs and essays, has been called “the greatest Irish poet of his generation” by Derek Mahon. Born to Irish parents in America, he returned to Ireland at…

Austin Clarke (1896-1974), along with Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh, is regarded as one of the leading Irish poets in the generation after Yeats. Born in Dublin he spent most of his life in Ireland, apart from a 16-year spell…

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. Born in Boston in the USA she was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her…

Kevin Crossley-Holland (b. 1941) grew up with a passion for history, encouraged by a father who recited folk tales to his son, accompanying himself on a Welsh harp. The young Kevin was so entranced by the medieval and ancient past…