Mark McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and attended schools all over the country, including mission schools in interior districts, as his father was a District officer in the colonial government of the time. He studied English at the University…

Peter Didsbury has described himself as ‘someone who’s constitutionally fascinated by myth and the weight of the past’ and indeed his poems seem to conjure a particular, possibly bygone England peopled with men working the land, butchers, fishermen, kings and…

Colette Bryce was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and lived in London for many years before moving to Scotland in 2002, where she held a fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee. From 2005-2007 she was North East…

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in Wales and France, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a…

John Watson was born in 1939 in the Bland district in NSW. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Sydney and worked as a high-school maths teacher for thirty years until taking early retirement at fifty-five. He then…

Claire Crowther lives in Somerset and has worked as a consumer journalist, editor, and communications director for many years.  As an undergraduate at Manchester University, she won the Shakespeare Scholarship and the George Gissing Memorial Prize in English Literature. Her…

W. N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961 and educated at Brasenose, Oxford, where he published his thesis on Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He is currently Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Herbert…

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….

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…

When Lorine Niedecker died of a brain haemorrhage in 1970 at the age of 67, her work was virtually unknown outside contemporary circles.  Indeed, some of the closest members of her family didn’t even know she wrote poetry. Five days…

Nigel McLoughlin was born in Enniskillen in 1968. In 2005 he moved to take up post at the University of Gloucestershire where he is now Professor of Creativity & Poetics. He has published five poetry collections and written many contributions…

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield, grew in Derbyshire, and studied Social and Political Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost (a Poetry…

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south east London, the fourth of eight children, to an English mother, a schoolteacher, and Nigerian father, a welder and local Labour councillor. She was educated at Eltham Hill Girls Grammar School, the Rose…

Matthew Francis was born in Hampshire in 1956 and educated at the City of London School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. After more than ten years in the IT industry, he enrolled at Southampton University in 1994 to study for a…

Pope was born into a Catholic family in 1688, the year of The Glorious Revolution, when Catholics could not live in London – the centre of literary life – or attend university. At the age of twelve he contracted a…

Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998), as well as three of translations, the most recent one being Songs of Kabir (2011). In his…

John Wilmot was born in 1647, the son of Henry Wilmot, a celebrated Royalist who had led the cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill. Henry helped the young Prince Charles escape to France after the disastrous Royalist defeat at the…

Alfred Edward Housman, the eldest son of a Bromsgrove solicitor, was born in 1859. He attended Bromsgrove School as a dayboy, but soon after he started there his mother fell ill and his father sank into helpless despondency; as the…