David Wagoner is widely regarded as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in Ohio and grew up in Indiana, where his mother, a trained opera singer, sang German lieder around the house. He has spoken in…

Linda Gregg [b. 1942], though born in New York, grew up in the woods of Marin County, California, the first of many landscapes that were to influence her work. She attended San Francisco State University, gaining her Masters there in…

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,…

Winner of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2001, Sally Read is one of a new generation of younger poets shaping the future of British poetry. Her work is notable for its coupling of a sensitive,…

Caroline Caddy was born in Perth, Western Australia, 1944 and spent her childhood in the United States of America and Japan. Since then Caroline has lived much of her life in Western Australia, where she raised two children. Caddy’s earliest…

Measured, musical and understated, Jacob Polley’s poems delve deep into the elemental, the eerie and the unstable. Whether conjuring a crow from the Biblical tale of Cain’s murder of Abel, his gloves “set alight” and “blackened into life”, or simply…

Jane Duran (b. 1944) is a writer whose work is often preoccupied with memory and exile. Born in Cuba, she grew up in the USA and Chile, the daughter of an American mother and a Spanish father who met after…

Leontia Flynn was lauded by Fran Brearton as: “one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since [Paul] Muldoon”. She was born in County Down in 1974 and has MA in English…

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…

Mark Tredinnick (b. 1962), though an established Australian writer, is a relatively new poet – The Road South, an audio CD (River Road Press 2008), is his first collection. Tredinnick was raised in Epping, a suburb of Sydney. He took…

Helen Farish was born in 1962 in Cumbria, where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-5). She has also been…

Matthew Hollis (b. 1971) has published two collections of his own poetry, and has contributed to several other poetic careers as an editor at Faber and Faber. He has also co-edited 101 Poems against War and, with W N Herbert,…

Judith Beveridge (born 1956) migrated with her family from London to Sydney in 1960 where she has lived ever since. Although she has only published three books of poetry (a fourth volume is due in 2009), she is regarded as…

Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942) is a poet whose work combines the political and the personal, the traditional and the radical, to startling effect. She is a New Yorker, born in the Bronx to Jewish parents who were the first in…

Maxine Kumin (b.1925) came to prominence as one of a generation of women poets who extended the boundaries of poetry, addressing areas of female experience which had not previously been written about. Less overtly political than Adrienne Rich and not…

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) and his poetry are inextricably bound up with the former iron-mining town of Millom, on the edge of the Lake District in Cumbria. Apart from several years spent in a TB sanatorium as a teenager, Nicholson never…

Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is most closely associated with the 1930s: much of his best poetry was written during this decade and other important works such as his autobiography, World Within World (1951), his novel The Temple (1988) and some volumes…

Austin Clarke (1896-1974), along with Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh, is regarded as one of the leading Irish poets in the generation after Yeats. Born in Dublin he spent most of his life in Ireland, apart from a 16-year spell…