Malika Booker is the author of ‘Breadfruit’ (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2007) and ‘Pepper Seed’ (Peepal Tree Press, 2013), which was longlisted for the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. More recently, she has won the 2019 Cholmondeley Award and the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. 

Malika Ndlovu is a South African poet who has performed her work across the globe. With a background in both theatre and arts management Ndlovu is a prolific creative facilitator, working with numerous visual artists, culture organizations, heritage institutions and…

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’….

Tuckerman’s beloved wife died in childbirth, and a powerful sense of grief and loss permeates many of his poems. He was a poet of the outdoors, spending much time wandering through the woods and fields of New England, and becoming…

Often associated with the short-lived Martian school of the 1980s, Christopher Reid’s poetry has come a long way since the extra-terrestrial metaphors and puzzling imagery that were the hallmark of his early writing. His gift for unusual, typically comic description…

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…

Charlotte Turner was born in 1749 into the landed gentry. Her father owned two prosperous estates, Stoke Place in Surrey and Bignor Park in Sussex, but gambling losses destroyed his fortune; aged fifteen Charlotte was married off to the wealthy but…

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the son of a stonemason. He trained and practised as an architect, but, as soon as he could, earned his living by writing the novels which made him famous. Then, after Jude the Obscure…

Linda Gregg [b. 1942], though born in New York, grew up in the woods of Marin County, California, the first of many landscapes that were to influence her work. She attended San Francisco State University, gaining her Masters there in…

Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which…

Alastair Reid (1926-2014) was one of Scotland’s foremost literary figures, admired as a craftsman in poetry, prose and translation. Since he left Scotland during World War II, he lived variously in Spain, France, Switzerland, the United States and South America….

Douglas Dunn (b. 1942) was awarded an OBE in 2003 for his services to literature over a career that includes many books of plays, poems, essays and fiction, as author and editor, and awards such as the Hawthornden Prize, the…