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…

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 is one of the 200 distinguished artists who are members of…

Kathleen Jamie spent much of her early poetic career answering the question posed by the disapproving elders in her famous poem ‘The Queen of Sheba’: “whae do you think y’ur?” Across a rich and varied body of writing, Jamie has…

Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written six collections of poetry, several shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; taught Greek at Oxford, sung in an Istanbul nightclub, is a Fellow of the Royal…

Michael Rosen (b. 1946) says he became a children’s poet by accident – “I thought I was being an ironic adult poet but children’s literature ‘claimed’ me”. He has since become a very well-known poet, for adults as well as…

In May 2019, Simon Armitage (b. 1963) was named as the UK’s Poet Laureate, an appointment greeted with delight by many in the poetry world and beyond. Armitage burst onto the poetry scene with Zoom! in 1989 and quickly established himself as the…

R. F. Langley (1938-2011), was not a prolific poet, but his work was noticed as long ago as 1979 by Jeff Nuttall, in his column in the Guardian, for its “sense of rhythm, sound and …a concentrated spirit of immense…