Robert Southey was an independently minded young man who was expelled from Westminster School for opposing flogging. He developed radical religious and political ideas and, at one stage, considered emigrating to America with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge to set…

Mary Robinson was a gifted musician, champion of the rights of women, novelist, poet and actress. She was born in Bristol to a wealthy family and received a good education, but her marriage to the thoroughly unreliable Thomas Robinson unravelled…

Anonymous is a well-known and prolific poet. Many of the traditional folk ballads we know today may have begun as songs sung by wandering minstrels,for which authorship was unimportant. The songs needed to be easily remembered, so a simple structure…

Charles Wolfe was an Irish priest and poet who is best remembered for this extremely popular elegy, which has appeared in many anthologies of poetry throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wolfe was educated at Trinity College Dublin and, at…

Born in Edinburgh, and trained as a lawyer, Walter Scott became an internationally popular poet, playwright and novelist. Scott’s influences include classical myths and legends, the German Romantics and the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders. His first published works…

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…

Thomas Love Peacock is probably best known today for his hilarious Nightmare Abbey, which cheerfully satirizes the interest of contemporary literature in morbid subjects and gothic settings. Some of the targets of his broadly affectionate satire were significant literary figures…

Clough suffered from periods of religious doubt throughout his life. His inability to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, which detailed the beliefs of the Church of England, meant that he felt compelled to leave his position as a Fellow at…

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…

Peter Didsbury has described himself as ‘someone who’s constitutionally fascinated by myth and the weight of the past’ and indeed his poems seem to conjure a particular, possibly bygone England peopled with men working the land, butchers, fishermen, kings and…

Although he is now renowned as a novelist, biographer and translator as well as a poet, D. M. Thomas wrote and published little else but poetry until he was forty, and has said that poetry has always been his ‘first…

Colette Bryce was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and lived in London for many years before moving to Scotland in 2002, where she held a fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee. From 2005-2007 she was North East…

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in Wales and France, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a…

John Watson was born in 1939 in the Bland district in NSW. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Sydney and worked as a high-school maths teacher for thirty years until taking early retirement at fifty-five. He then…

A poet, soldier and courtier, Philip Sidney was one of the most celebrated figures of the Elizabethan age. He was a member of a distinguished and talented family; his sister, Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, was a patron of writers…

Chidiock Tichborne was part of the Babington plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. When the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne, Catholics such as Tichborne had a degree of freedom to practise their faith. However, when Elizabeth was excommunicated by…