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…

Charlotte Mew was surrounded by mental ill health and death from a young age. Three brothers died while she was still a child and two other siblings were committed to mental institutions. She vowed never to marry, fearful of the…

Luke Kennard is the author of numerous works of poetry and short fiction.  HIs first collection of poems, The Solex Brothers, was published in 2005, and won him one of that year’s Eric Gregory Awards. His second collection, The Harbour…

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1962; he grew up there, and in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, the U.S.A., Hong Kong, Bahrain and the UK. He holds a B.A. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and studied…

Hone Tuwhare (1922 — 2008) is New Zealand’s pre-eminent Maori poet; his tribal affiliations are with Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popote and Uri-o-Hau. From a working class background (at fifteen he was apprenticed as a New Zealand…

Edward Thomas wrote all his poetry in less than three years, between 1914, when he wrote his first, and 1917, when he was killed in the Battle of Arras. Most of his poems were published posthumously; they show sensitive observation…

Robert Browning was born in South London in 1812. He was largely self-educated, utilising his father’s extensive library of over six thousand volumes. A voracious reader, Browning would later draw on his wide and sometimes arcane learning in his poetry,…

Edward Baugh is probably best known as a literary critic whose distinguished academic career has been devoted to West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of the towering Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott,…

Antony Rowland (b.1970) is Professor of Literary Studies in English at The University of Salford where he teaches literature and creative writing. His poetry has been published extensively in journals, magazines and anthologies including Critical Quarterly, Stand, P.N. Review, New…

Sylvia Townsend Warner [1893-1978] is best known today as a groundbreaking feminist and lesbian writer who championed the cause of the outsider in novels such as Lolly Willowes. However, this is only one aspect of a writer whose literary career…

Mick Imlah (1956 – 2009) was one of the most brilliant poets of his generation. He published just two collections, Birthmarks in 1988, and twenty years on, the long-awaited The Lost Leader, which won the Forward Prize, and was short-listed…

David Musgrave (b. 1965) traces his ancestry to English and Irish convicts and free settlers who came to Australia in the early nineteenth century. Among his forebears are an American Sea captain from Nantucket, a fifteen year old convict from…

Gary Langford (b. 1947, Christchurch) is a New Zealand poet and author with more than forty books to his name, including sixteen volumes of poetry. His literary career includes editorships and teaching positions in his native country and Australia, and…

joanne burns was born in Sydney in 1945 and has lived there for most of her life, never far from the shores of Sydney Harbour. Over a dozen collections of her writing have been published. Her first poetry collection Snatch…

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) at the time of her death was respected as a “writer’s writer” on account of her technical mastery and exemplary patience and dedication to her craft. Since then her reputation has risen steadily until she has become…

Heather McHugh (b. 1948) was brought up in rural Virginia. She credits her early overwhelming shyness with inspiring, somewhat paradoxically, an intense pleasure in language: her reluctance to speak herself matched by her passionate attention to “every twist of tone…

Edwin Brock (1927-1997) wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’ and ‘Song of the Battery Hen’, but his work deserves wider recognition beyond these anthology favourites. Born in South London in…

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. Born in Boston in the USA she was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her…