“Raise high the roofbeams, here comes a strong new presence in poetry,” wrote Lorna Goodison when Kei Miller burst onto the poetry scene with his 2006 debut Kingdom of Empty Bellies. Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and read…

Pam Ayres is celebrated in the UK (and far beyond) as a favourite radio, TV and stage entertainer; it is impossible to read her comic poems without hearing her voice in your head. She says that she wrote them to…

Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island, Canada and grew up in the United States. He was a shy dreamy child, and claimed not to have been very bright at school. When he was a year old,…

Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in Chicago in a poor yet stable and loving family. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother a teacher and classically trained pianist. Brooks was thirteen when her first…

Fergus Allen was born in London in 1921, of an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. After childhood and Quaker schools in Ireland, he read engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, where he wrote light verse for the college magazine; he…

Rabindranath Tagore, known as the Bard of Bengal, was born in 1861 to an aristocratic family of social reformers in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the seat of the British government in India. His prolific output spanned poetry, plays, songs, novels,…

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) remains a controversial and influential figure. Born a postman’s son in Langholm Dumfriesshire, he trained to be a school teacher in Edinburgh, then worked on local newspapers in Scotland and South Wales before enlisting in the Royal…

Edmund Spenser is often mentioned alongside Shakespeare, Marlowe and Donne as one of the greatest poets of the Elizabethan period. He is probably best known for his long, allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queen, which is full of medieval knights,…

John Wilmot was born in 1647, the son of Henry Wilmot, a celebrated Royalist who had led the cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill. Henry helped the young Prince Charles escape to France after the disastrous Royalist defeat at the…

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…

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…

Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to parents from North East England, and grew up in County Durham, where she attended Durham High School for Girls. She graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1982 with a double first in…

Only seven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime; these were heavily edited. Many of the rest were found after her death, in little packets bound together to make small books. They were regarded at first as odd,…

Edward Baugh is probably best known as a literary critic whose distinguished academic career has been devoted to West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of the towering Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott,…

Dominic Francis Moraes (1938–2004), considered a pioneer of Indian English poetry, published nearly 30 books during his lifetime and contributed significantly to intercontinental poetic discourse through essays, articles, and critical thought. Born in Bombay, he was the son of Frank…