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Poet
W. H. Auden
B. 1907 D. 1973
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is one of the most influential voices in 20th Century poetry. It is impossible to summarise his achievements, ranging as they do across some four hundred poems in a bewildering variety of styles, as well as…
Poet
Ted Hughes
B. 1930 D. 1998
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is a brooding presence in the landscape of 20th Century poetry, not unlike the six hundred feet-high Scout Rock which overshadowed his Yorkshire childhood. Hughes’ early experience of the moors and his industrially-scarred surroundings were the keynotes…
Poet
Rudyard Kipling
B. 1865 D. 1936
Rudyard Kipling (b. 1865- d. 1936) was born in Bombay (present day Mumbai). His father was a teacher in a local school of art. At the age of six he was sent to England to be educated and spent a…
Poet
Kit Wright
B. 1944
Kit Wright (b. 1944) is the author of more than twenty-five books, for both adults and children, and the winner of awards including an Arts Council Writers’ Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Alice Hunt Bartlett…
Poet
Harold Pinter
B. 1930 D. 2008
Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) is best known for theatrical work, but was a poet before a playwright, and in early 2005, told the BBC that he was leaving plays to focus on poetry and political speeches. His poetry publications…
Poet
Michael Symmons Roberts
B. 1963
Michael Symmons Roberts (b. 1963) is the author of four collections of poetry, and won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, Corpus. Roberts is a lyric poet with philosophical and metaphysical concerns. These are strongly evident…
Poet
Mimi Khalvati
B. 1944
Mimi Khalvati (b. 1944, Tehran) spent much of her childhood at boarding school on the Isle of Wight, only returning to Iran at seventeen. She has been resident in the UK since the age of twenty-five, where she has published…
Poet
James Fenton
B. 1949
James Fenton (b. 1949) grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire and was educated at Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence ‘Our Western Furniture’. This early poem about the cultural collision…
Poet
Wendy Cope
B. 1945
Wendy Cope (b. 1945) is a poet whose witty lyrics and pitch-perfect parodies have gained her a readership far beyond most of her peers. Born in Erith, Kent, she read History at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She then taught in…
Poet
Ken Smith
B. 1938 D. 2003
Ken Smith (1938-2003) was born in Rudston, Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer whose work meant Ken had an itinerant childhood. He attended Leeds University at a key time when Geoffrey Hill was teaching in the English Department and…
Poet
Roger McGough
B. 1937
Roger McGough (b. 1937) is one of Britain’s best-loved poets. Top-selling The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10 with Liverpool poets Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, hits with Mike McCartney and John Gorman in The Scaffold and college touring with…
Poet
Alfred Tennyson
B. 1809 D. 1892
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the third surviving son of a rector whose violent alcoholism blighted the family home. Tennyson went to Cambridge where he met Arthur Henry Hallam whose early death was to prompt Tennyson to…
Poet
Kevin Crossley Holland
B. 1941
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…
Poet
Felix Dennis
B. 1947 D. 2014
Felix Dennis (1947 – 2014) was the colourful publishing entrepreneur whose company, Dennis Publishing, owns many successful titles including flagship publication The Week. A regular fixture in the Sunday Times rich list Dennis travelled a long way since the poverty…
Poet
Roy Fisher
B. 1930 D. 2017
Roy Fisher (b. 1930) grew up in Birmingham and was educated at the local grammar school and Birmingham University. He worked as a teacher of English in schools and colleges, including latterly the University of Keele, Staffordshire. From 1982 onwards…
Poet
John Heath Stubbs
B. 1918 D. 2006
John Heath-Stubbs (1918 – 2006) recalled how the teacher at his tiny village school read her pupils Our Island Story, sparking in him the lifelong fascination with history that informed his poetic career. He completed his education at Worcester College…
Poet
Penelope Shuttle
B. 1947
Penelope Shuttle (b. 1947) has made her home in Cornwall since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and rich history are continuing sources of inspiration. So too is the personal and artistic union Shuttle shared with her husband, the poet…
Poet
Elizabeth Jennings
B. 1926 D. 2001
Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) was born in Boston, Lincolnshire but moved to Oxford at the age of six where she lived for the rest of her life. She studied at St. Anne’s College, Oxford and worked in advertising, at the City…