Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which…

Linda Gregg [b. 1942], though born in New York, grew up in the woods of Marin County, California, the first of many landscapes that were to influence her work. She attended San Francisco State University, gaining her Masters there in…

Olive Senior is a singularly original writer with a genius for re-inhabiting and recreating the wonder and cruel theatre of childhood, while also exploring adult pretensions and realities in relation to history, locality and the multifarious and revelatory world of…

Peter Scupham (b. 1933) is a poet of formal distinction with a particular fascination for history and its bearing on his native country. This attention to the English experience puts him in company with other poets of the same generation…

Howard Nemerov was born into a wealthy and sophisticated New York family in 1920. His sister was the photographer Diane Arbus, and as children their father who was a painter, art connoisseur and philanthropist greatly influenced their interest in the…

As a tutor and now Emeritus Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and winner of accolades including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Cholmondeley Award and a Forward Prize, John Fuller (b. 1937) has led a distinguished and prolific writing career,…

Amy Clampitt was born in Iowa in 1920 and grew up on the 300-acre farm owned by her Quaker grandparents in New Providence. She spent much of her childhood exploring the countryside which, coupled with the pleasures of naming and…

Choman Hardi is the seventh and youngest child of Kurdish poet Ahmed Hardi. After several stages of forced displacement, she was granted refugee status in England in 1993. She studied at Oxford, London, and Kent universities and her post-doctoral research…

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was the second of four children, her father the eldest of twelve. As she said herself “In a large family you hear a great many stories,” a grounding which influenced her career as a writer of both poetry…

Julia Copus was born in London in 1969 and grew up in a house with three brothers who were learning to play musical instruments. Two of them later went on to be professional musicians, and Copus has said in interview…

Benjamin Zephaniah was born in Birmingham, and grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth, where he was sent to an approved school. He left school at 13 unable to read or write and was imprisoned for burglary. His political anger…

Caroline Caddy was born in Perth, Western Australia, 1944 and spent her childhood in the United States of America and Japan. Since then Caroline has lived much of her life in Western Australia, where she raised two children. Caddy’s earliest…

Lorna Goodison is one of the finest Caribbean poets of her generation and lauded as such by Kwame Dawes in the Caribbean Writer: “Superlatives glint all over commentary on Lorna Goodison’s work… she is now one of the greatest!” Goodison…

Fay Zwicky was born in Melbourne in 1933. Her father was a doctor, her mother a musician. From early in life she trained as a pianist, performing with her violinist and cellist sisters while still at school. She began publishing…

Antony Rowland (b.1970) is Professor of Literary Studies in English at The University of Salford where he teaches literature and creative writing. His poetry has been published extensively in journals, magazines and anthologies including Critical Quarterly, Stand, P.N. Review, New…

Through direct, colloquial language and often intense imagery, Catherine Smith invites the reader into a world at once familiar and unsettling. Her poems display a gift for teasing significance from relatable personal experience: vivid dreams of secondary school exams; the…

Edgell Rickword (1898-1982) is best known as the influential editor of journals such as Calendar of Modern Letters and The Left Review and was a key figure in establishing radical criticism in the wake of the First World War. However,…

Patrick Brandon (b.1965) is a regularly exhibiting visual artist whose poems display a painter’s eye for telling detail and a skilled command of striking imagery. His lines frequently tug at the minutiae and junk of our modern lives – a…