Born in Birmingham in 1950, Sheenagh Pugh lived in Wales for many years before moving to Shetland, where she currently resides. She is the author of nine poetry collections (with a tenth forthcoming in 2013) and two novels, as well…

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was the first Polynesian poet to have a collection published in English, Mine Eyes Dazzle, published in 1950. The attractive qualities of his poems are obvious: confident and subtle lyricism, an aesthetic assuredness, a sensibility painfully…

In its vivid, hypnotic and often startlingly imaginative qualities, the poetry of Alice Oswald (b. 1966) confirms a unique sensibility at work. From her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize…

Born in Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker who divides her time between London and India. This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic…

Andrew Greig’s second collection Men on Ice in 1977 changed his life. He had been what he calls an “armchair climber”, attracted by “the imagery and intensities” of climbing – however, mountaineer Mal Duff took Greig’s metaphors literally and invited…

Through direct, colloquial language and often intense imagery, Catherine Smith invites the reader into a world at once familiar and unsettling. Her poems display a gift for teasing significance from relatable personal experience: vivid dreams of secondary school exams; the…

Susan Hampton (b. 1949) was born in Inverell, New South Wales. She taught literature and journalism and has been writer-in-residence at several Australian universities. Since 1992, she has lived in Canberra, where she works as a freelance editor. Hampton has…

Julia Bird’s poetry explores modern life with both precise observation and cinematic sweep. Her debut collection, Hannah and the Monk, is brimming with tall tales and urban myths, and a heady mixture of high and pop culture – poems “where…

Alastair Reid (1926-2014) was one of Scotland’s foremost literary figures, admired as a craftsman in poetry, prose and translation. Since he left Scotland during World War II, he lived variously in Spain, France, Switzerland, the United States and South America….

Dan Burt’s poems offer the reader a dual perspective on American culture, drawing on the poet’s personal experience of being both an insider and an outsider. The son of Jewish immigrants, Burt grew up in the tough environs of South…

Douglas Dunn (1942–2026) was awarded an OBE in 2003 for his services to literature over a career that includes many books of plays, poems, essays and fiction, as author and editor, and awards such as the Hawthornden Prize, the Cholmondely…

Bill Manhire (b. 1946) was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, and joined the English Department at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1973, where he has held a Personal Chair since 1997. As a ‘young’ New Zealand poet of the late 1960s,…

Daljit Nagra (b. 1966) was the first poet to win the Forward Prize for both his first collection of poetry, in 2007, and for its title poem, ‘Look, We Have Coming to Dover!’, three years earlier. An earlier pamphlet, Oh…

Owen Sheers (b. 1974, Fiji) was chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets and as one of the Independent’s top 30 young British writers on the strength of his first book of poetry, The Blue Book. His second, Skirrid…

Jackie Kay (b. 1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was…

Peter Porter’s (1929-2010) urbane poetry was first published in 1961, since when he published sixteen collections and much journalism, collaborated with visual arts, and was Writer-in-Residence at several universities, including Hull, Reading, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Sydney. He was awarded…

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the third surviving son of a rector whose violent alcoholism blighted the family home. Tennyson went to Cambridge where he met Arthur Henry Hallam whose early death was to prompt Tennyson to…

George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) was born in the remote Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland and apart from two periods of education at Newbattle Abbey College and the University of Edinburgh, he lived there all his life. The…