Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes moved to Jamaica in 1971 and spent most of his childhood and early adult life there. As well as poetry, he is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and plays; he also practices as…

Combining edgy vernacular and blunt reportage with a delicate lyricism, Nick Laird’s poems delight, surprise and unnerve. Often concerned with the lingering sectarian violence of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, his writing complicates the personal and political, exposing the fault lines in…

Born in The Netherlands, Riemke Ensing moved to New Zealand in 1951. A distinguished poet, Ensing’s life has also been spent as a tutor at The University of Auckland (NZ), where until recently she was an honorary research fellow, as…

John Donne was the greatest non-dramatic poet of his time, and its most admired preacher. He was born in 1571, a Londoner and the son of Catholic parents. In his teens, he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and in his…

Diana Bridge introduces her second collection of poems, The Girls on the Wall (1999), with a quote from M.M. Bakhtin who remarked that “outsidedness is a most powerful factor in understanding [… since] meaning only reveals its depth once it…

Andrew Johnston is the son of an English Professor, has had a successful career as a professional journalist including working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune for many years, and now lives in France where he runs a…

Siobhan Harvey’s collection of poems Lost Relatives (2011) reveals her navigating shifting geographies in order to locate the sensorium of the self. Her compass is a pragmatic feminism that derives from personal experience, and from her formal education at Manchester…

Anthony Lawrence was born in 1957 in Tamworth. He left school early, taking up work as a Jackeroo, going on to work as a landscape gardener, fisherman and truck driver. Later he studied primary school teaching and for while taught…

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…

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet and academic, partner of artist Simon Edmonds and mother of children, Johnny and Elvira. Her poetry was first published in book form in AUP New Poets 1 (AUP, 1999). Since, Jackson has published…

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…

Celia A Sorhaindo is a poet from the Caribbean island of Dominica, where she now resides after living many years in the UK. Her poetry has been widely published in journals ranging from The Caribbean Writer to New Daughters of Africa, and longlisted for the UK National Poetry Competition (2017/18). Her first pamphlet, ‘Guabancex’ (Papillote Press, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean literature, and her poem ‘Weather Conditions’ was among the winners of Poetry Archive’s WordView 2020 Collection. Her first full length poetry collection, ‘Radical Normalisation’, is due to be published in the autumn of 2022 (Carcanet Press).  

Lee Harwood was one of the leading poets of his generation. Born in Leicester in 1939, he grew up in Chertsey, Surrey. He studied English at Queen Mary College, University of London, and soon became involved in the poetry scene…

Ocean Vuong’s literary output is a survival project, its high stakes evident in both its central questions – pertaining to desire, trauma, masculinity, personal and public histories, to sexuality – and in its mutable forms. ‘Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement,’ Vuong has said, ‘I see form as an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be…

Born in Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker who divides her time between London and India. This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic…

Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning poet, physicist, translator, educator and broadcaster, active with such outlets as Kaleidoscope, The Verb and the BBC World Service.  His work is as profoundly moving as it is thought-provoking, shifting convincingly between lyric, performance, science,…