Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
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Poet
Jade Cuttle graduated from Cambridge University with First-Class Honours in Modern and Medieval Languages and Literature, and undertook an MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia. A poet and plant-whisperer, Jade has been commissioned to write for BBC…
Poet
Ocean Vuong
B. 1988
Ocean Vuong’s literary output is a survival project, its high stakes evident in both its central questions – pertaining to desire, trauma, masculinity, personal and public histories, to sexuality – and in its mutable forms. ‘Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement,’ Vuong has said, ‘I see form as an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be…
Special Collection
Interview
Did you know there is more than one Simon Armitage? In this interview, the best-selling poet and novelist introduces you to them and talks about the importance of voice in his work.
Interview
Wendy Cope muses on the lines that keep coming back, the challenges of formal verse and how a poem can be seriously funny.
Interview
Sujata Bhatt is a poet of many different cultures: in this interview, she talks about her travels and how they've influenced her writing and lets us into the "private and inner world" of making poems.
Interview
Join acclaimed poet Jo Shapcott in her Welsh retreat as she talks about the pleasures of science and music that inform her work - and the importance of getting up early to write!
Interview
Jean Sprackland talks about her inspiration and process for writing poetry.
Interview
Choman Hardi answers questions on her Kurdish background and the influence this has on her poetry and painting.
Special Collection
Poet
Phyllis Wheatley
B. 1753 D. 1784
Phillis Wheatley was the first US slave to publish a book of poems. Born in Africa in about 1753 and shipped as an 8 year old child to the Boston Slave Market, she was purchased by John Wheatley to be…
Poet
Sarah Howe
B. 1983
Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. She studied English at Cambridge, where from 2010-2015 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius…
Poet
Makhosazana Xaba
B. 1957
Makhosazana (Khosi) Xaba’s poetry, fiction and academic work reflects a lifetime actively involved with politics. Born in Greytown, Kwazulu-Natal, Xaba is trained as both a midwife and a psychiatric nurse, has worked with national and international NGOs and media organisations in…
Poet
David Morley
B. 1964
David Morley is an ecologist, poet, editor and teacher. Emerging with Releasing Stone (Arc, 1989), he has since published five collections with Carcanet, the most recent, The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems (2015), won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award; his previous collection, The…
Poet
Mary Jo Salter
B. 1954
Mary Jo Salter describes herself as a ‘particularly formal poet’. Her attention to and rigorous engagement with poetic form is not only manifested across her eight books of poetry, but in her co-editorship of the Norton Anthology of Poetry in…
Poet
Clive Wilmer
B. 1945
Clive Wilmer’s first collection of poems, The Dwelling-Place (Carcanet, 1977), opens with an epigraph from John Ruskin’s Val d’Arno, which begins: “A man’s religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built…
Poet
David Kinloch
B. 1959
From Scots dialect to Frank O’Hara and the New York School, from the candidly personal to unusual dramatic monologues, David Kinloch’s poetry is stylistically, thematically and emotionally wide-ranging. Kinloch first emerged, alongside Robert Crawford and other now established names, as…
Poet
John Glenday
B. 1952
John Glenday had published four collections of poetry at the time of his recording for the Poetry Archive: The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989), which received a Scottish Arts Council Book Prize; Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995), which was a Poetry…