Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, the son of poverty-stricken actors. His father died from consumption; soon afterwards, his English mother, who in her time had played Juliet, Ophelia and a range of Shakespearian leading roles, died and left…

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…

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886 – 1962), grew up in East Lancashire. She is now best known as a working-class writer, feminist, and socialist activist, but she was first noticed as a poet, journalist and children’s writer. She is believed to be…

Jane McKie’s is a poetry of wonder. But rather than describing work that is uniquely in awe of its subjects, ‘wonder’ might instead be taken here as indicative of McKie’s poetic approach, which is open and engaged, but always interrogative…

Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1963. He grew up on his family’s far near Kilbarchan, and studied for a degree in Geology at Glasgow University. After spending time in Turkey, he returned to Scotland, where he now…

Writing in his 1990s study of Alasdair Gray’s novels, Stephen Bernstein identifies Gray as “one of the most important living writers in English. His satirical blend of realism and fantasy and his compassionate use of humor and sorrow distinguish his…

Toni Stuart was born in Cape Town in 1983 and grew up in the city. Her poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Looking Back, Going Forward: Young Voices on Freedom (British Council, STE Publishers, 2004), and…

F.T. Prince was one of the most influential and critically-neglected Anglophone poets of the twentieth century. Born in South Africa in 1912, he became deeply engaged as a teenager with French symbolist poetry (particularly Valéry and Mallarmé), an interest which…

Richly visual and with an eye for the telling detail, Sue Hubbard’s poetry is the work of a writer who has also spent much of her life as an art critic. The poems in this Archive recording showcase what Helen…

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…

Witty and warm, expressed in musical but plain language, Laurence Lerner’s poems cast an intelligent and human eye over the lives we variously lead. His first published collections introduce an amiable and wryly observant poetic persona, a thoughtful poet and…

  Playful, impassioned, deftly musical and energised, Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poems leap off the page and bet to be read aloud. Hers is a poetry often balanced between two seemingly distinct worlds: a modern New Zealand that is urbane, cultured…

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…

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…

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…

Anna Crowe is a poet and translator based in St Andrews, Fife. Born in Plymouth, which in interview she says is “as far from Scotland as one can get in the UK,” Crowe moved to St Andrews to study and…

  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,…