Charles Brasch belonged to a generation of New Zealand poets who, rising to prominence in the 1940s, expressed anxieties that, while personal and pākehā (non-Maori), seemed endemic to both the nation and the century. They saw themselves as forging, through…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A unique and energetic force in contemporary British poetry, John Agard’s poems combine acute social observation, puckish wit and a riotous imagination to thrilling effect. Born in Guyana, South America in 1949, Agard moved to Britain in the late seventies….

Choman Hardi is the seventh and youngest child of Kurdish poet Ahmed Hardi. After several stages of forced displacement, she was granted refugee status in England in 1993. She studied at Oxford, London, and Kent universities and her post-doctoral research…

Benjamin Zephaniah was born in Birmingham, and grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth, where he was sent to an approved school. He left school at 13 unable to read or write and was imprisoned for burglary. His political anger…

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland’s most outstanding contemporary poets, and one of the most admired English-language poets anywhere in the world. He was born into a Catholic family in 1951 in a predominantly Protestant region of Portadown, County Armagh…

Deryn Rees-Jones was named as one of the Next Generation Poets following her spirited debut The Memory Tray, which was also shortlisted for a 1994 Forward Prize. This collection recaptures the dream-state of childhood, exploring issues of gender, identity and…

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…

Peter Boyle (b. 1951) grew up in Melbourne and Sydney, graduating from Sydney University specialising in Philosophy and Literature. He began writing poetry at age 15 but it was not until 42 that his first collection of poetry Coming home…

In 2008, Kathryn Simmonds won the Forward Best First Collection Award with Sunday at the Skin Laundrette, which Michael Symmons Roberts lauded as “a remarkable debut.” He praised her “expansive imagination”, her “wit and humanity”. Also shortlisted for the Costa…

Li-Young Lee  draws on his Chinese-American heritage in his poems, in particular his early experience of exile and migration. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, the son of Chinese parents exiled there having fallen foul of the Communist authorities. Lee’s…

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) at the time of her death was respected as a “writer’s writer” on account of her technical mastery and exemplary patience and dedication to her craft. Since then her reputation has risen steadily until she has become…

Son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Gerald Stern grew up in Pittsburgh, in a house with no books. It wasn’t as if being a writer was discouraged, he says, it just wasn’t considered something that anyone in his family would…

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…