John Berryman (1914-1972) was born John Smith Jnr. in rural Oklahoma, the product of an unhappy marriage between a small-town banker and schoolteacher. When he was eight, Berryman suffered the defining trauma of his life when his father killed himself…

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) packed a huge amount into his sixty years: a rollercoaster of triumphs and disasters that informed his writing and pushed back the boundaries of what was deemed suitable subject matter for poetry. He was born into an…

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) is often grouped with such poets as Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Robert Lowell as a leading figure in the so-called ‘Confessional Movement’. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts into an upper middle-class home, Sexton never…

Edwin Brock (1927-1997) wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’ and ‘Song of the Battery Hen’, but his work deserves wider recognition beyond these anthology favourites. Born in South London in…

Ken Smith (1938-2003) was born in Rudston, Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer whose work meant Ken had an itinerant childhood. He attended Leeds University at a key time when Geoffrey Hill was teaching in the English Department and…

Felix Dennis (1947 – 2014) was the colourful publishing entrepreneur whose company, Dennis Publishing, owns many successful titles including flagship publication The Week. A regular fixture in the Sunday Times rich list Dennis travelled a long way since the poverty…

Elaine Feinstein (b.1930 – d.2019) was from Bootle, Lancashire and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an editor, a university lecturer and a journalist. From 1976 she lived on her writing. Feinstein’s early poetry bears the influence…

A native of Rochester, New York, John Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was the prolific author of twenty three volumes of poetry, plus fiction, plays and criticism. He was the recipient of numerous literary awards, including The Pulitzer Prize, National Book…

Denise Riley (b. 1948) is active across the full range of poetic life – poet, essayist, teacher, editor, researcher – and beyond, with her interests extending to politics, history, philosophy, feminist theory and visual art. She lectures at the University…