John Donne was the greatest non-dramatic poet of his time, and its most admired preacher. He was born in 1571, a Londoner and the son of Catholic parents. In his teens, he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and in his…

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…

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…

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…

M. K. (Michael Kennedy) Joseph was among the foremost New Zealand writers of his generation, both as poet and novelist. Born in Chingford, Essex to Catholic parents, who, after some years in post-war Belgium and France, immigrated to New Zealand…

Sophie Hannah is a poet and crime fiction writer. Her crime fiction frequently appears on bestseller lists and her poetry is praised by her contemporaries, readers and critics for its comic and off-centre observation of our world combined with an…

Billy Childish (b. Steven John Hamper, 1959, Chatham, England) is a prolific poet, author, musician, and painter. A cult figure in Europe, America, and Japan, he has published over 40 collections of poetry, recorded over 100 full-length independent LP’s, and…

Chris Wallace-Crabbe was born in 1934. His father was a journalist and his mother a pianist, and he describes his family tradition as ‘military-bohemian Scots’. After leaving school he worked as cadet metallurgist at the Royal Mint, Melbourne, then, at…

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….

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…

Stanley Kunitz [1905-2006] is a towering figure in American poetry, not just by dint of his longevity, but for the fact that he was still producing some of his finest work well into his nineties. His vitality and continuing relevance…

Olive Senior is a singularly original writer with a genius for re-inhabiting and recreating the wonder and cruel theatre of childhood, while also exploring adult pretensions and realities in relation to history, locality and the multifarious and revelatory world of…

Jan Owen, born in Adelaide in 1940, traces her lineage back through generations of Welsh seafarers and Cornish miners. She studied arts and librarianship and raised three children before claiming time to write and travel. From her prize-winning first book…

Howard Nemerov was born into a wealthy and sophisticated New York family in 1920. His sister was the photographer Diane Arbus, and as children their father who was a painter, art connoisseur and philanthropist greatly influenced their interest in the…

As a precocious adolescent with a penchant for raw confessionalism, Clare Pollard (b.1978) appeared on the poetry scene in the late nineties with her energetic, expressive and markedly contemporary work. She was chosen as one of Poetry Review’s New Poets…

Through direct, colloquial language and often intense imagery, Catherine Smith invites the reader into a world at once familiar and unsettling. Her poems display a gift for teasing significance from relatable personal experience: vivid dreams of secondary school exams; the…

Edgell Rickword (1898-1982) is best known as the influential editor of journals such as Calendar of Modern Letters and The Left Review and was a key figure in establishing radical criticism in the wake of the First World War. However,…