Witty and warm, expressed in musical but plain language, Laurence Lerner’s poems cast an intelligent and human eye over the lives we variously lead. His first published collections introduce an amiable and wryly observant poetic persona, a thoughtful poet and…

  Playful, impassioned, deftly musical and energised, Selina Tusitala Marsh’s poems leap off the page and bet to be read aloud. Hers is a poetry often balanced between two seemingly distinct worlds: a modern New Zealand that is urbane, cultured…

Clive Wilmer’s first collection of poems, The Dwelling-Place (Carcanet, 1977), opens with an epigraph from John Ruskin’s Val d’Arno, which begins: “A man’s religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built…

  RON BUTLIn is a former Edinburgh Makar / Poet Laureate (2008-14). He has published ten volumes of poetry, including verse for children. His work has won many prizes and been translated into over a dozen languages.  His poetry collection,…

Born in 1950 in Edinburgh, Tom Pow is the author of twelve collections, including, most recently, At the Well of Love (2016) and A Wild Adventure (2014), the latter a biography, rendered in poetry, of convict forger and illustrator Thomas Watling. Sparks!, published in 2005,…

Tara Bergin was born in Dublin and moved to the UK in 2002 to undertake academic research. This culminated in a PhD on Ted Hughes’s translations of the post-war Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky which she completed at Newcastle University, where…

Catherine Byron is an Irish poet who often collaborates with visual and sound artists. Her first book of poetry, Settlements, appeared in 1985, and she has since published five collections, the most recent being The Getting of Vellum (which was…

Dick Davis, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been hailed by the TLS as ‘our finest translator of Persian poetry’, and retired in 2012 from the Ohio State University where he was Professor of Persian and Chair…

In its insistent rhythms and vivid parsing of postcolonial histories, Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry is among the most significant to emerge from the West Indies in the last century. Born in Barbados in 1930, Brathwaite won a scholarship to study at…

Jonathan Edwards was born in Newport, South Wales and grew up in Crosskeys. He received a BA in English and American Literature and an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, and now teaches English at a secondary school…

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’…

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…

John McAuliffe was born in 1973, and grew up in Listowel, County Kerry. He studied at NUI Galway, and has since 2002 lived in the UK, where he co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He…

Richard Murphy has been called a poet of two traditions, British and Irish. Born in 1927 at Milford, a small “Big House” of his mother’s Anglo-Irish family near Kilmaine, County Mayo, Richard spent five of his childhood years in the British…

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…

Sandeep Parmar was born in Nottingham and raised in Southern California. She received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008, on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy, and she holds an MA in…

S. J. Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist & vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant-garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published six collections of poetry, and has been commissioned…

James Matthews, poet, writer and publisher, has produced five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, a novel and an anthology of poetry, which he edited. Most of his work was banned under the previous government and was translated…