Fleur Adcock (b.1934) was a New Zealander by birth but spent part of her childhood in England, returning to live in London in 1963. She worked as a librarian until 1979 before becoming a freelance writer. She authored ten books…

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography Levine deals with his experiences as a factory worker, his family and friends,…

“Poetry now, every bit as much as in the Romantic age, is a utopian demonstration, by aesthetic means, of what true freedom would be like. It engages us to imagine something better than what at present we are afflicted with;…

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was a friend and contemporary of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender at Oxford and his poetry has often been linked to their own. Whilst sharing certain characteristics with them, including a sharp political awareness, in recent…

Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was born into an aristocratic family and, along with her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, had a significant impact on the artistic life of the 20s. She encountered the work of the French symbolists, Rimbaud in particular, early…

Robert Minhinnick (b. 1952) is a writer and environmentalist; his book Watching the Fire Eater, which combined these interests, was named Welsh Book of the Year in 1993. He edits Poetry Wales, and founded both Friends of the Earth Cymru…

It is no surprise that Muneera Pilgrim won the 2018 Ann Kaloski Naylor award for Adventurous Writing – for ‘adventurous’ is exactly the word that springs to mind when hearing her poetry. Founding member of Nana collective and Artist Associate…

Toni Stuart was born in Cape Town in 1983 and grew up in the city. Her poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Looking Back, Going Forward: Young Voices on Freedom (British Council, STE Publishers, 2004), and…

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…

F.T. Prince was one of the most influential and critically-neglected Anglophone poets of the twentieth century. Born in South Africa in 1912, he became deeply engaged as a teenager with French symbolist poetry (particularly Valéry and Mallarmé), an interest which…

Hannah More’s poem was written in support of William Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery. A passionate, poetic explanation of the anti-abolitionists’ argument, this extract is part of a 294 line poem. ‘Oroonoko’, in the fourth line of this extract, is…

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,…

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in Wales and France, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a…

Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written six collections of poetry, several shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; taught Greek at Oxford, sung in an Istanbul nightclub, is a Fellow of the Royal…

Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire, and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Since 1981 he has lived France, first in Paris, and since 1991 in the Loire Valley, where he is Maitre de Conferences in the English department of Tours…

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) was an innovator, both in subject matter and form, writing in the transcendental tradition of Emerson and Thoreau but making it his own. The key to his powerful identification with nature can be found in his childhood….

Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is most closely associated with the 1930s: much of his best poetry was written during this decade and other important works such as his autobiography, World Within World (1951), his novel The Temple (1988) and some volumes…