Christian Campbell’s debut collection, Running the Dusk, was published to international critical acclaim in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Cave Canem Prize and the Guyana Prize for Literature, won a Lannan Residency…

James Lasdun is  a rare example of a writer whose success has manifested itself across genres. In addition to his four collections of poetry, the latest being Water Sessions (2012), he has published two novels, four short story collections, several…

Anthony Vahni Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to Cornwall’s former capital, Launceston, as the Causley…

Carol Rumens, nee Lumley, was born in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school, and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She later gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for…

Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982 and grew up in Sheffield. She read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2006. Her first collection, Public Dream, was…

Carole Satyamurti is a poet and sociologist. She grew up in Kent, and has lived in North America, Singapore and Uganda. She published three volumes of poetry with Oxford University Press, of which the first and third were Poetry Book…

Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, musician and lecturer. He began writing as a young child, and cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the spiritual Baptist church that his grandparents attended, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech….

Philip Gross was born in Delabole, north Cornwall, as the only child of a wartime Displaced Person from Estonia and the village schoolmaster’s daughter. He grew up in Plymouth, studied English at Sussex University, and began writing in the 1980s….

Jane Draycott studied at King’s College London and Bristol, where she took a postgraduate degree in Medieval English Literature. Her most recent poetry collection, Over, (Carcanet, 2009) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Her first two collections No…

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955, and lives in Oxford, where he teaches part-time and reviews poetry and the visual arts for a number of newspapers and magazines. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The…

Little is known about Shakespeare’s life. Existing records give tantalising glimpses: he was born in 1564, the eldest son of an illiterate but locally prominent Stratford glover, married (at eighteen) the twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway, had three children of whom one,…

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, the son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold. Matthew attended Balliol College, Oxford and was a close friend of an older fellow Rugbeian, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. In 1847 Arnold met and…

Anna Barbauld (nee Aikin) was born in 1743, daughter of a nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, who taught her to read English before she was three and to master French, Italian, Latin and Greek while still a child. Her book of…

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in England. In 1630 she emigrated to Massachusetts, with her father Thomas Dudley and her husband Simon Bradstreet. They sailed as members of the expedition led by John Winthrop, eventually the first governor of…

Marlowe is believed to have written all his poems and translations as a young man studying at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, and was the son of a shoemaker. Ovid’s elegies…

Andrew Marvell was born near Kingston Upon Hull in 1621, the son of a priest. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, but left his studies early when his father was drowned in a boating accident on the Humber. He travelled abroad for…

Mary Pierrepont was born in 1689, the first child of the Earl of Kingston. Her mother died in 1694 and Mary was groomed to become hostess and housekeeper for her father, then a Whig MP. Her tasks included presiding over his…

Alison Brackenbury was born in 1953 in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. She read English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and has worked as a librarian in a technical college (1976-83), then as a part-time accounts and clerical assistant (1985-1989). From 1990 until…