Stephen Lightbown was born in Blackburn, Lancashire.  In 1996, aged 16, he experienced a life-changing accident and is now paralysed from below the waist.  Lightbown writes extensively but not exclusively about his life as a wheelchair user. He teaches yoga…

Geoffrey Lehmann was born in Sydney in 1940, his childhood was spent at McMahon’s Point on Sydney Harbour.  Educated at Anglican schools, Lehmann went on to study arts and law, graduating from the University of Sydney in 1960 and 1963…

Phillis Wheatley was the first US slave to publish a book of poems. Born in Africa in about 1753 and shipped as an 8 year old child to the Boston Slave Market, she was purchased by John Wheatley to be…

Deborah Alma is a UK poet, editor and teacher. She has worked using poetry with people with dementia, in hospice care, with women’s groups and with children in schools and lectured at both Worcester and Keele universities. From 2012 she…

Exposing overlooked corners of Mumbai and New York; highlighting perspectives from around the world; uncovering racial, political and religious truths, these are just a few of the main themes Jeet Thayil explores across his novels and poetry, connecting his readers…

Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the only collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. It also won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014)…

Ocean Vuong’s literary output is a survival project, its high stakes evident in both its central questions – pertaining to desire, trauma, masculinity, personal and public histories, to sexuality – and in its mutable forms. ‘Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement,’ Vuong has said, ‘I see form as an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be…

Tracey Herd is a poet who is concerned with perception and memory, in particular, how our subjectivities warp and magnify specific elements of our experiences over time. In her poem ‘Archive’, ‘the past appears ‘scattered and miniature’, while the speaker…

Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s more softly spoken bards, but his particular Celtic muse is no less intense for all his quieter rhetorical flourishes and domestic asides. Indeed, his poetry has an affecting immediacy which comes from its easy…

From Scots dialect to Frank O’Hara and the New York School, from the candidly personal to unusual dramatic monologues, David Kinloch’s poetry is stylistically, thematically and emotionally wide-ranging. Kinloch first emerged, alongside Robert Crawford and other now established names, as…

Ahren Warner grew up in Lincolnshire before moving to London, then Paris. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Confer (Bloodaxe, 2011), which was both a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best…

Dick Davis, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been hailed by the TLS as ‘our finest translator of Persian poetry’, and retired in 2012 from the Ohio State University where he was Professor of Persian and Chair…

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…

Justin Quinn’s poems are formal in the very best sense, finding rhythms and rhymes to match the complexities and intimacies of our lives and the world in which we live them. Lyrically exact and engaging, accessible yet intelligent, he is…

Lewis Carroll was the literary pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, the third in a family of eleven children; he had seven younger sisters. In childhood, he produced magazines for his sisters which display his love of parody,…