After winning the 1961 Transatlantic Review national short story competition when he was just seventeen, Richard Berengarten has since been the recipient of many international awards and distinctions, far too many to summarise here. Significant highlights include an Eric Gregory…

Sarojini Naidu, famously known as ‘the Nightingale of India,’ was a remarkable female political activist and freedom fighter in pre-colonial India. Her poetic works are celebrated for their lyrical romanticism, capturing the beauty and diversity of Indian culture with sweetness…

The poems that made Wilfred Owen famous were mostly published after his death in action a week before the end of the First World War. Powerfully influenced by Keats and Shelley, he experimented with verse from childhood, but found his…

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was the second of four children, her father the eldest of twelve. As she said herself “In a large family you hear a great many stories,” a grounding which influenced her career as a writer of both poetry…

John Moat (b. 1936, India) was best known as a co-founder of the Arvon Foundation, and not as the prodigiously gifted poet, novelist and painter, who lived in a romantic fastness near the north Devon coast for half a century,…

Andrew Johnston is the son of an English Professor, has had a successful career as a professional journalist including working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune for many years, and now lives in France where he runs a…

Stanley Kunitz [1905-2006] is a towering figure in American poetry, not just by dint of his longevity, but for the fact that he was still producing some of his finest work well into his nineties. His vitality and continuing relevance…

Stephanie Norgate was born in 1957 and grew up in Selborne, Hampshire. She spent part of her childhood reading the naturalist Gilbert White and playing in his house and garden, which impelled an early love of nature and of writing….

Michael Longley (b.1939, Belfast) is a central figure in contemporary Irish poetry. A forceful figure within the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, where he founded the literary programme, he was one of the 200 distinguished artists who are members of…

Penelope Shuttle (b. 1947) has made her home in Cornwall since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and rich history are continuing sources of inspiration. So too is the personal and artistic union Shuttle shared with her husband, the poet…

Andrew Motion read English at Oxford University where he won the Newdigate Prize and studied the work of Edward Thomas, an abiding influence. At Hull University he taught English and worked alongside Philip Larkin, another acknowledged mentor, whose official biographer…