Bill Manhire (b. 1946) was born in Invercargill, New Zealand, and joined the English Department at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1973, where he has held a Personal Chair since 1997. As a ‘young’ New Zealand poet of the late 1960s,…

Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953, USA) is the author of six books of poetry, several translations and two collections of essays. Her most recent volume After, on being published in both the US and UK, was nominated for the UK’s T….

W. S. Graham (1918-1986) was neglected in his own lifetime but his reputation as a major modernist romantic has been growing steadily since his death, with the help of influential champions such as Harold Pinter and Michael Schmidt. He was…

Laurie Lee (1914-1997) is famous for the life he wrote about so engagingly in three volumes of autobiography, but his first love was always poetry, a passion that left its mark on his precise and lyrical prose. Born in Stroud,…

Robin Robertson (b. 1955) is a poet of austere and meticulous diction, tempered by a sensuous music. He was born in Scone, Perthshire, and brought up on the north-east coast of Scotland but has spent much of his professional life…

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…

E A Markham (1939-2008) had a career that embraced the range of literary life, and more. Aside from his poetry, for which he was nominated for the T S Eliot Prize in 2002, he wrote novels, essays, plays and short…

Jan Kemp was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1949. She was the sole woman anthologized in The Young New Zealand Poets (1973), and in 1979 co-starred with Alistair Campbell, Hone Tuwhare, and Sam Hunt on a national poetry-reading tour….

C. K. Williams (b. 1939) was particularly well-known for his formal innovations, the long-lined poems of clause-rich syntax which became his trademark. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Williams described how he came comparatively late to the writing of poetry, though…

Ogden Nash ( 1902-1971) was a master, perhaps the 20th Century master, of light verse whose continuing popularity shows that the term ‘light’ is not incompatible with long-lasting. He was born in Rye, New York, but as a child moved…

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is one of the most successful children’s writers in the world: around thirty million of his books have been sold in the U.K. alone. Children love his poems and stories because he writes from their point of…

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) is best known for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’ which has come to be recognised as one of the key texts of British modernism. ‘Briggflatts’ was the culmination of a lifelong dedication to poetry which began in Bunting’s…

Jackie Kay (b. 1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was…

Adrian Henri (b. 1932- d. 2000) was a much-loved figure in the world of performance poetry, fine art and beyond. Born in Birkenhead, Henri grew up in Rhyl, Wales, during the war years and trained as a painter at King’s…

Robert Minhinnick (b. 1952) is a writer and environmentalist; his book Watching the Fire Eater, which combined these interests, was named Welsh Book of the Year in 1993. He edits Poetry Wales, and founded both Friends of the Earth Cymru…

Owen Sheers (b. 1974, Fiji) was chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets and as one of the Independent’s top 30 young British writers on the strength of his first book of poetry, The Blue Book. His second, Skirrid…

Jeremy Hooker (b. 1941) grew up in Warsash near Southampton, and the landscape of this region has remained an important source of inspiration. Many of his poems were written in Wales, where he has lived for long periods of his…

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was the prolific author of many volumes of poetry, short stories and novels, including one of the most enduringly popular poems in the English language, ‘The Listeners’. Born in Charlton, Kent, he was educated at…