Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, the son of poverty-stricken actors. His father died from consumption; soon afterwards, his English mother, who in her time had played Juliet, Ophelia and a range of Shakespearian leading roles, died and left…

Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. She studied English at Cambridge, where from 2010-2015 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius…

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886 – 1962), grew up in East Lancashire. She is now best known as a working-class writer, feminist, and socialist activist, but she was first noticed as a poet, journalist and children’s writer. She is believed to be…

Writing in his 1990s study of Alasdair Gray’s novels, Stephen Bernstein identifies Gray as “one of the most important living writers in English. His satirical blend of realism and fantasy and his compassionate use of humor and sorrow distinguish his…

Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba’s poetry, fiction and academic work reflects a lifetime actively involved with politics. Born in Greytown, Kwazulu-Natal, Xaba is trained as both a midwife and a psychiatric nurse, has worked with national and international NGOs and media organisations in…

Witty and warm, expressed in musical but plain language, Laurence Lerner’s poems cast an intelligent and human eye over the lives we variously lead. His first published collections introduce an amiable and wryly observant poetic persona, a thoughtful poet and…

Mary Jo Salter describes herself as a ‘particularly formal poet’. Her attention to and rigorous engagement with poetic form is not only manifested across her eight books of poetry, but in her co-editorship of the Norton Anthology of Poetry in…

Anna Crowe is a poet and translator based in St Andrews, Fife. Born in Plymouth, which in interview she says is “as far from Scotland as one can get in the UK,” Crowe moved to St Andrews to study and…

John Glenday had published four collections of poetry at the time of his recording for the Poetry Archive: The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989), which received a Scottish Arts Council Book Prize; Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995), which was a Poetry…

Richard Price’s poetry is perhaps most distinctive for its compelling mixture of lyric and avant-garde experimental tendencies; he is a poet as likely to write with a tender warmth and compassion as he is to push language’s everyday, hesitant provisionality…

Direct, impassioned and rooted in the everyday language of his native Glasgow, Tom Leonard’s poems remind us that politics is everywhere: in the words we speak, the streets we live on, the way we treat each other. There is an…

Isobel Dixon was born in Mthatha, South Africa. She studied English at Stellenbosch University, before pursuing postgraduate study at Edinburgh University. She now lives in Cambridge and works as a literary agent in London, returning frequently to Cape Town and…

Flitting between book smarts and wry humour, lyric eloquence and occasionally acerbic bluntness, the poetry of David Wheatley shares much in common with the prose he writes as a respected critic, and for which he is perhaps better known. But…

Jack Underwood is an active presence across the British poetry landscape: as one of the first four poets as part of the Faber New Poets pamphlets scheme in 2009, as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, tutor…

Knowing, precise and often cheerfully acerbic, Connie Bensley’s poems revel in poking gentle fun at the self-deceptions and delusions of middle-class suburban life. Whether she brings her lapidary and resolutely unadorned words to bear on our misplaced hopes and fears,…