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…

Born in Welwyn Garden City, England, to Welsh parents in 1962, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied poetry and theatre with Derek Walcott. He moved to the USA in 1996, teaching first at…

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in England. In 1630 she emigrated to Massachusetts, with her father Thomas Dudley and her husband Simon Bradstreet. They sailed as members of the expedition led by John Winthrop, eventually the first governor of…

James Lasdun is  a rare example of a writer whose success has manifested itself across genres. In addition to his four collections of poetry, the latest being Water Sessions (2012), he has published two novels, four short story collections, several…

Christian Campbell’s debut collection, Running the Dusk, was published to international critical acclaim in 2010. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Cave Canem Prize and the Guyana Prize for Literature, won a Lannan Residency…

Tanya Shirley is a startlingly bold writer with a particular gift for highlighting the telling detail in her vivid and arresting poems, which variously contain portraits of lovers, colourful eccentrics and family snapshots that capture the elusive magic of childhood…

Only seven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime; these were heavily edited. Many of the rest were found after her death, in little packets bound together to make small books. They were regarded at first as odd,…

In 2009, WS Merwin won the Pulizer Prize for poetry for the second time, with The Shadow of Sirius. In an interview soon afterward, Merwin recalls his earliest observations about poetry: “The idea of writing to me was from the…

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…

Caroline Caddy was born in Perth, Western Australia, 1944 and spent her childhood in the United States of America and Japan. Since then Caroline has lived much of her life in Western Australia, where she raised two children. Caddy’s earliest…

Jane Duran (b. 1944) is a writer whose work is often preoccupied with memory and exile. Born in Cuba, she grew up in the USA and Chile, the daughter of an American mother and a Spanish father who met after…

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…

John Montague (b.1929, New York), the author of many books of poetry, stories, memoirs and essays, has been called “the greatest Irish poet of his generation” by Derek Mahon. Born to Irish parents in America, he returned to Ireland at…

Kelly Grovier (b. 1968) grew up in America and was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. He came to study at Oxford University after winning a British Marshall scholarship, and now teaches English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth…

Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953, USA) is the author of six books of poetry, several translations and two collections of essays. Her most recent volume After, on being published in both the US and UK, was nominated for the UK’s T….

Ruth Fainlight (b. New York, 1931) is an award-winning poet and translator, whose collections, starting with Cages in 1966, have spanned five decades. Her 1976 collection Another Full Moon was described by Peter Porter as having “the steadiness and clarity…

Maxine Kumin (b.1925) came to prominence as one of a generation of women poets who extended the boundaries of poetry, addressing areas of female experience which had not previously been written about. Less overtly political than Adrienne Rich and not…

Li-Young Lee  draws on his Chinese-American heritage in his poems, in particular his early experience of exile and migration. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, the son of Chinese parents exiled there having fallen foul of the Communist authorities. Lee’s…