Gwyneth Lewis is one of the most prominent Welsh poets of her generation, and the first writer to take up the Welsh Laureateship. She wrote the bilingual words that front the Wales Millennium Centre, in six foot high stained glass…

Harry Guest was born in Wales in 1932. After four years at Malvern College, he read Modern Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before attending the Sorbonne, where he wrote a thesis on Stephane Mallarme. He spent much of his life…

A miner’s son from Nottingham, Lawrence was a prolific writer of short stories, essays, poems and novels before his death at the age of forty-four in 1930. He was a rebellious, restless and polemical writer who was viewed with suspicion…

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although…

Greta Stoddart was born in Henley-on-Thames, and grew up in Oxford and Belgium. She studied drama at Manchester University then trained as an actor in Paris, touring for five years with the theatre company she co-founded, Brouhaha, before settling in…

Lorraine Mariner grew up in Upminster and attended Huddersfield University, where she read English, and University College London, where she read Library and Information Studies. She lives in London and works as an Assistant Librarian at the Poetry Library, Southbank…

Jane Yeh is an American poet who has lived in England for over a decade. Born in New Jersey, she was educated at Harvard University, the University of Iowa—where she took an MFA at the prestigious writers’ program—and at Manchester…

At various times, Walt Whitman was a teacher, a journalist, a government official and a clerk. He also spent a significant period in his life working in the hospitals of the American Civil War, and witnessed the acute suffering of…

George Meredith was a Victorian poet, author and journalist. He published eighteen novels between 1856 and his death in 1909 and, although many had limited commercial and critical success,The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885) were well received….

Sociologist, civil rights campaigner, historian, Harvard graduate, anti-war activist, academic, essayist, novelist, communist and, of course, poet, W.E.B. DuBois was passionately committed to fighting prejudice and racism in America throughout his long life. The co-founder of the National Association for…

Dunbar was one of the first African-American poets to be widely known and admired in America. His parents were formerly enslaved people, and Dunbar incorporated some of their tales of plantation life into his work. After a successful reading at…

Cavafy is widely considered to be one of the greatest Greek poets of the twentieth century. A perfectionist as regards his work, which he constantly revised, he published only 154 poems in his lifetime. From his birth in 1863 to…

Amy Levy was one of seven children born to a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. She was in many ways a pioneering woman, becoming the first Jewish woman ever to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1879. She had a wide circle…

Swinburne came from an aristocratic background and drew on a wide range of influences and interests from an early age, including Elizabethan dramatists, Greek and Latin poets and French writers. He was an excitable, extrovert character who made friends with…

Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality in 1895 ended a spectacularly successful career. Although he lived for a few more years in exile in France after his release and produced some moving poetry, his life was effectively over. He had been a…

Intellectually gifted Mary Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her parents were impressively well connected to writers and musicians in the London of the last half of the nineteenth century. Mary met weekly with friends in the late…

Chesterton is probably best known for his popular priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared in over fifty short stories. However, he was also a poet, biographer, essayist, dramatist, critic, journalist, advocate of a political movement called ‘Distributism’ and, after his conversion…

Amy Lowell was born into an affluent Massachusetts family and educated at home and in private schools in Boston. Her financial resources helped her develop a liberated and unconventional lifestyle. Amy Lowellonce remarked that God had made her a businesswoman…