Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890, the son of Russian immigrants; his father was a learned Jew who scraped a living as a pedlar and market trader. In 1897 the family moved to Whitechapel in London’s East End. Isaacs’s…

In his poem ‘Alba Einstein’ Robert Crawford re-imagines the famous scientist as a Scot (‘He’d always worn brogues. / Ate bannocks in exile’), a deceptively lighthearted take on one of the poet’s most enduring themes: the complexities of Scottish identity….

  RON BUTLIn is a former Edinburgh Makar / Poet Laureate (2008-14). He has published ten volumes of poetry, including verse for children. His work has won many prizes and been translated into over a dozen languages.  His poetry collection,…

Born in York in 1952, Steve Ellis has published three collections of poetry, including West Pathway (1993) and Home and Away, verse translations of Dante’s Inferno and The Divine Comedy and a number of academic monographs on writers such as Chaucer, T….

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4th 1928, and raised in Arkansas. She is often referred to as the pioneer for African-American Women’s writing in the U.S. and remains an internationally celebrated storyteller. Angelou’s poetry, autobiographical fiction, essays…

Richard Price’s poetry is perhaps most distinctive for its compelling mixture of lyric and avant-garde experimental tendencies; he is a poet as likely to write with a tender warmth and compassion as he is to push language’s everyday, hesitant provisionality…

Nissim Ezekiel, recognised as the father of Indian English poetry, was a foundational figure in introducing Modernism to the post-independence Indian literary scene. He captured the essence of everyday life through idiosyncratic descriptions of ordinary men and women. Through his…

Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning poet, physicist, translator, educator and broadcaster, active with such outlets as Kaleidoscope, The Verb and the BBC World Service.  His work is as profoundly moving as it is thought-provoking, shifting convincingly between lyric, performance, science,…

Vikram Seth is a poet and novelist whose contributions to literature are harboured in various eclectic and traditional forms. The sites of his poetry and prose are intercontinental, creating literary habitats of far away lands and cultures. In the modern…

A celebrated poet and a writer whose voice and poetics are immediately recognizable, Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father, Her poetry has hugely contributed to the UK poetry landscape such as…

Poet and publisher Bob Cobbing was born in Enfield, England. He became known internationally for pioneering visual, concrete, and sound poetry and for his dynamic and often startling poetry performances; he was known too for his role as publisher, under…

Dominic Francis Moraes (1938–2004), considered a pioneer of Indian English poetry, published nearly 30 books during his lifetime and contributed significantly to intercontinental poetic discourse through essays, articles, and critical thought. Born in Bombay, he was the son of Frank…

Farjeon was born in London in 1881 into a family inured in art and literature. Her father, Benjamin Leopold was a novelist and her mother, Margaret Jane was the daughter of the American Actor, Joseph Jefferson.  Farjeon is recorded as…