In its vivid, hypnotic and often startlingly imaginative qualities, the poetry of Alice Oswald (b. 1966) confirms a unique sensibility at work. From her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize…

Dorothea Smartt is a stunning performance artist and poet. She has taught in the United Kingdom, and Bahrain, South Africa, Barbados and the U.S, after beginning her writing life in the Black/feminist co-operatives of the Eighties, and publishing her first…

In 2009, WS Merwin won the Pulizer Prize for poetry for the second time, with The Shadow of Sirius. In an interview soon afterward, Merwin recalls his earliest observations about poetry: “The idea of writing to me was from the…

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet and academic, partner of artist Simon Edmonds and mother of children, Johnny and Elvira. Her poetry was first published in book form in AUP New Poets 1 (AUP, 1999). Since, Jackson has published…

Alistair Paterson (ONZM) is one of New Zealand’s leading poets, editors and literary thinkers. He is the author of nine poetry collections, a novel, plays and numerous critical publications including The New Poetry: Considerations Towards Open Form (1981) which laid…

Kris Hemensley was born in 1946 on the Isle of Wight, in the UK. His father was English, his mother from the illustrious Tawa family of Alexandria. The family lived in Egypt between 1949-52, returning to Southampton where Hemensley completed…

Grace Nichols is a poet whose work has been central to our understanding of the important cultural Caribbean-British connection for nearly 3 decades. From her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), to her more recent work such…

In writing at once intense and wistful, Adam O’Riordan deploys precise imagery and memorable music to poignant effect. His poems, concerned with erasure and the revivifying limits of verse’s charms, span from imaginative encounters with the past – the fear…

Anthony Lawrence was born in 1957 in Tamworth. He left school early, taking up work as a Jackeroo, going on to work as a landscape gardener, fisherman and truck driver. Later he studied primary school teaching and for while taught…

āotearoa New Zealand writer, poet and academic Briar Wood is of Te Hikutu ki Hokianga Ngapuhi Nui, Scottish, Cornish, English and Portuguese descent. Her poetry has been published in a number of international journals and anthologies, including Albert Wendt, Robert…

Lawrence Sail was born in London in 1942 and brought up in Exeter. He read French and German at St John’s College, Oxford, taught for four years in Kenya, then held various teaching posts in England before becoming a freelance…

Siobhan Harvey’s collection of poems Lost Relatives (2011) reveals her navigating shifting geographies in order to locate the sensorium of the self. Her compass is a pragmatic feminism that derives from personal experience, and from her formal education at Manchester…

Known primarily as a prose-writer, Janet Frame’s passion since the age of nine was for poetry. She never stopped writing poems, expressing the recurrent themes of nature, animals, people, death and writing itself, and aiming for a “truthful vocabulary of…

Brian Turner was born in 1944. An outdoorsman, a mountaineer, a national representative hockey player, a keen cricketer, and an avid senior road cyclist he has made a unique career in New Zealand letters as a celebrated sports journalist, an…

Andrew Johnston is the son of an English Professor, has had a successful career as a professional journalist including working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune for many years, and now lives in France where he runs a…

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was the first Polynesian poet to have a collection published in English, Mine Eyes Dazzle, published in 1950. The attractive qualities of his poems are obvious: confident and subtle lyricism, an aesthetic assuredness, a sensibility painfully…

Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August, 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, attended Tulse Hill secondary school, and later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University…

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,…