Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) is familiar to readers all over the world as the author of some of the finest and most influential fiction of the last few decades. Titles like The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, and The Robber Bride…

Alan Brownjohn (b. 1931) grew up in London and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He worked first as a schoolteacher and then a lecturer before becoming a full-time freelance writer in 1979. His writing life since then has demonstrated…

D. J. Enright (1920-2002) was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, into a family of modest means. However, the young Dennis won a place at Downing College, Cambridge where he was influenced by his controversial tutor, F R Leavis, an…

Elizabeth Bartlett (1924 – 2008) grew up in Deal, Kent. Her childhood was one of hardship and although she gained a grammar school scholarship she left education at fifteen. At nineteen she married and had one son. She worked for…

Allen Curnow (1911-2001) is a central figure in the emergence of an authentic New Zealand literature. A clue to this pivotal role can perhaps be traced in the fruitful duality of his parentage: born in Timaru he was the son…

In May 2019, Simon Armitage (b. 1963) was named as the UK’s Poet Laureate, an appointment greeted with delight by many in the poetry world and beyond. Armitage burst onto the poetry scene with Zoom! in 1989 and quickly established himself as the…

Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960) draws on his dual Guyanese/British heritage throughout his writing which incorporates poetry, novels and plays. Although born in London, he lived in Guyana until he was twelve before returning to England where the highly politicised atmosphere…

Richard Wilbur (1921 – 2017) is perhaps best known as the second person to hold the position of US Poet Laureate (1987-88), and was also the recipient of laurels including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the Bollingen Prize, the National Book…

James Berry (1924 – 2017) spent his childhood in a village in Jamaica, before working in the United States, finally settling in Britain in 1948 where he remained for the rest of his life. One of the first black writers…

Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was a poet, playwright and novelist whose literary career spanned half a century, the first of his fourteen collections of poetry, After Every Green Thing, being published in 1948, his latest collected appearing in 2003. In between Abse…

Anne Ridler (1912-2001) moved in literature throughout her life; she was the daughter of writers, with more in the extended family, and joined Faber and Faber’s poetry department while in her early twenties. She edited many collections and anthologies while…

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) was the author of twelve books of poetry, four of autobiography, and much scholarly work, particularly on Blake and Yeats, which prove her transcendent understanding of the art of poetry, and the art of living. The latter…

Vernon Scannell (1922 – 2007) published his poetry from the 1950s right up to the last year of his life, but seems to be less well-known than he deserves, despite being the recipient of the Heinemann Award for Literature and…

In addition to writing poetry for both children and adults, John Mole (b. 1941) is an accomplished jazz clarinettist and has been known to combine poetry and jazz with other poet-musicians such as Roy Fisher and John Lucas. He has…

Anne Stevenson, inaugural winner of the Northern Rock Writers Award in 2002, was born in England of American parents in 1933 and educated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father was professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. After…

R. F. Langley (1938-2011), was not a prolific poet, but his work was noticed as long ago as 1979 by Jeff Nuttall, in his column in the Guardian, for its “sense of rhythm, sound and …a concentrated spirit of immense…

P J Kavanagh (1931 – 2015) was the author of eight books of poems, an essayist and travel-writer, a novelist, and editor of the poems of Ivor Gurney; he received the Cholmondely Award for Poetry, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and…

Sean O’Brien (b. 1952) is a central figure in the contemporary poetry world – he has won major prizes for each of his five poetry collections, including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham award, the E.M. Forster Award and, twice,…