Through direct, colloquial language and often intense imagery, Catherine Smith invites the reader into a world at once familiar and unsettling. Her poems display a gift for teasing significance from relatable personal experience: vivid dreams of secondary school exams; the…

Edgell Rickword (1898-1982) is best known as the influential editor of journals such as Calendar of Modern Letters and The Left Review and was a key figure in establishing radical criticism in the wake of the First World War. However,…

Sylvia Townsend Warner [1893-1978] is best known today as a groundbreaking feminist and lesbian writer who championed the cause of the outsider in novels such as Lolly Willowes. However, this is only one aspect of a writer whose literary career…

Patrick Brandon (b.1965) is a regularly exhibiting visual artist whose poems display a painter’s eye for telling detail and a skilled command of striking imagery. His lines frequently tug at the minutiae and junk of our modern lives – a…

Measured, musical and understated, Jacob Polley’s poems delve deep into the elemental, the eerie and the unstable. Whether conjuring a crow from the Biblical tale of Cain’s murder of Abel, his gloves “set alight” and “blackened into life”, or simply…

Jane Duran (b. 1944) is a writer whose work is often preoccupied with memory and exile. Born in Cuba, she grew up in the USA and Chile, the daughter of an American mother and a Spanish father who met after…

Pam Ayres is celebrated in the UK (and far beyond) as a favourite radio, TV and stage entertainer; it is impossible to read her comic poems without hearing her voice in your head. She says that she wrote them to…

Mick Imlah (1956 – 2009) was one of the most brilliant poets of his generation. He published just two collections, Birthmarks in 1988, and twenty years on, the long-awaited The Lost Leader, which won the Forward Prize, and was short-listed…

Chris McCabe’s work crosses artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2013 and his five collections of poetry are The Hutton Inquiry (Salt, 2005), Zeppelins (Salt, 2008),…

Julia Bird’s poetry explores modern life with both precise observation and cinematic sweep. Her debut collection, Hannah and the Monk, is brimming with tall tales and urban myths, and a heady mixture of high and pop culture – poems “where…

Deryn Rees-Jones was named as one of the Next Generation Poets following her spirited debut The Memory Tray, which was also shortlisted for a 1994 Forward Prize. This collection recaptures the dream-state of childhood, exploring issues of gender, identity and…

Few other contemporary British poets combine the intensity of Sarah Maguire’s lyrical imagination with the breadth of her geopolitical reach. From the first poem (‘May Day, 1986’) of her first collection (Spilt Milk), her searchingly intelligent poems interrogated how even…

Fergus Allen was born in London in 1921, of an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. After childhood and Quaker schools in Ireland, he read engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, where he wrote light verse for the college magazine; he…

Helen Farish was born in 1962 in Cumbria, where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-5). She has also been…

Polly Clark was born in Toronto, Canada and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland. She has pursued several careers, including zoo-keeping at Edinburgh Zoo, teaching English in Hungary, and publishing at Oxford University Press. She won…

Matthew Hollis (b. 1971) has published two collections of his own poetry, and has contributed to several other poetic careers as an editor at Faber and Faber. He has also co-edited 101 Poems against War and, with W N Herbert,…

Kelly Grovier (b. 1968) grew up in America and was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. He came to study at Oxford University after winning a British Marshall scholarship, and now teaches English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth…

Clive James (b. 1939, Sydney) is well known to UK audiences for work throughout the cultural sphere. His career as a poet continued alongside work that is, perhaps, more high-profile – he was the author of more than thirty books,…