Patience Agbabi is a poet much celebrated for paying equal homage to literature and performance. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, her work moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page…

Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ took on such a vibrant life of its own after her death that, somehow, its author became almost irrelevant. In fact, Hemans was an accomplished and prolific poet who wrote over twenty volumes of verse before her…

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…

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…

Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire, and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Since 1981 he has lived France, first in Paris, and since 1991 in the Loire Valley, where he is Maitre de Conferences in the English department of Tours…

Luke Kennard is the author of numerous works of poetry and short fiction.  HIs first collection of poems, The Solex Brothers, was published in 2005, and won him one of that year’s Eric Gregory Awards. His second collection, The Harbour…

Born in Barbados, where she still resides, Esther Phillips graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami in 1999, winning the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry thesis. In February…

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…

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, came to England when she was a few months old, and grew up in Hatfield. The experience she describes in her recording of ‘growing up… and feeling half-Pakistani… on the edge of things’…

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…

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…

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955, and lives in Oxford, where he teaches part-time and reviews poetry and the visual arts for a number of newspapers and magazines. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The…

Jane Draycott studied at King’s College London and Bristol, where she took a postgraduate degree in Medieval English Literature. Her most recent poetry collection, Over, (Carcanet, 2009) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Her first two collections No…

Philip Gross was born in Delabole, north Cornwall, as the only child of a wartime Displaced Person from Estonia and the village schoolmaster’s daughter. He grew up in Plymouth, studied English at Sussex University, and began writing in the 1980s….

J.O Morgan lives on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. He is the author of six collections of poetry, each a single book-length poem. His first, Natural Mechanical (CB Editions, 2009), won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was…

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942. She studied at Stanford University and received her PhD from Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She has published twelve books of poems, including Satan Says (1980), The Father (1992), Stag’s Leap (2012), Odes (2016)…

Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry is marked by a gift for poetic portraiture, sketching characters at moments of emotional intensity. From encounters during his childhood in Ireland, to elegiac recollections of academics and poets in Oxford, O’Donoghue’s readers are met by a…

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…