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’…

Inventive, irreverent and comic, Ross Sutherland (b. 1979) is a force of nature on the UK spoken word scene. Alongside Luke Wright, he was one of the founding members of Aisle 16, a stand-up collective and irony-soaked ‘poetry boyband’ which,…

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…

‘Every now and again there arrives at a poetry magazine a poem that clearly announces a new voice… with something to say, and in brilliant command of the means of saying it’, said The Rialto editor Michael Mackim of reading…

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…

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although…

John Whitworth (1945-2019) was an English poet who was born in India.  He began writing as an undergraduate at Oxford, and published nine collections, from Unhistorical Fragments (Secker & Warburg, 1980) to Girlie Gangs (Enitharmon, 2011). Whitworth’s poems have appeared…

Patience Agbabi is a poet much celebrated for paying equal homage to literature and performance. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, her work moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page…

Born in Scotland, Stevenson was an unconventional and adventurous novelist, poet, essayist, short story and travel writer with a remarkable gift for captivating story-telling. Some of his prose works, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,…

Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ took on such a vibrant life of its own after her death that, somehow, its author became almost irrelevant. In fact, Hemans was an accomplished and prolific poet who wrote over twenty volumes of verse before her…

Luke Kennard is the author of numerous works of poetry and short fiction.  HIs first collection of poems, The Solex Brothers, was published in 2005, and won him one of that year’s Eric Gregory Awards. His second collection, The Harbour…

Vona Groarke is one of the leading Irish poets of her generation. Born in Mostrim, Ireland, she studied at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Cork. She has held positions at Villanova and Wake Forest Universities in the USA, and…

Mark McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and attended schools all over the country, including mission schools in interior districts, as his father was a District officer in the colonial government of the time. He studied English at the University…

In his poem ‘Alba Einstein’ Robert Crawford re-imagines the famous scientist as a Scot (‘He’d always worn brogues. / Ate bannocks in exile’), a deceptively lighthearted take on one of the poet’s most enduring themes: the complexities of Scottish identity….

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south east London, the fourth of eight children, to an English mother, a schoolteacher, and Nigerian father, a welder and local Labour councillor. She was educated at Eltham Hill Girls Grammar School, the Rose…

Carol Rumens, nee Lumley, was born in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school, and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She later gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for…

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, the son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold. Matthew attended Balliol College, Oxford and was a close friend of an older fellow Rugbeian, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. In 1847 Arnold met and…

Hone Tuwhare (1922 — 2008) is New Zealand’s pre-eminent Maori poet; his tribal affiliations are with Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popote and Uri-o-Hau. From a working class background (at fifteen he was apprenticed as a New Zealand…