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,…

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…

Vidyan Ravinthiran is a poet, critic and scholar from the UK. He is known for his range of work exploring his Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, delving into diasporic perspectives and colonialism, with a focus on the effects of assimilation, both…

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…

“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;…

Amy Lowell was born into an affluent Massachusetts family and educated at home and in private schools in Boston. Her financial resources helped her develop a liberated and unconventional lifestyle. Amy Lowellonce remarked that God had made her a businesswoman…

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…

Mark McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and attended schools all over the country, including mission schools in interior districts, as his father was a District officer in the colonial government of the time. He studied English at the University…

Matthew Francis was born in Hampshire in 1956 and educated at the City of London School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. After more than ten years in the IT industry, he enrolled at Southampton University in 1994 to study for a…

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…