Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) remains a controversial and influential figure. Born a postman’s son in Langholm Dumfriesshire, he trained to be a school teacher in Edinburgh, then worked on local newspapers in Scotland and South Wales before enlisting in the Royal…

Elaine Feinstein (b.1930 – d.2019) was from Bootle, Lancashire and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an editor, a university lecturer and a journalist. From 1976 she lived on her writing. Feinstein’s early poetry bears the influence…

Jenny Joseph (b. 1932 – d. 2018) was originally from Birmingham but her first remembered home was in leafy Buckinghamshire. She read English at St Hilda’s College Oxford. A variety of occupations included being a newspaper reporter, lecturer in language…

Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written six collections of poetry, several shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; taught Greek at Oxford, sung in an Istanbul nightclub, is a Fellow of the Royal…

Richard Wilbur (1921 – 2017) is perhaps best known as the second person to hold the position of US Poet Laureate (1987-88), and was also the recipient of laurels including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the Bollingen Prize, the National Book…

Peter Dale (b. 1938) studied English at Oxford University where he became friends with the poets Ian Hamilton and Kevin Crossley-Holland, and William Cookson with whom Dale went on to edit the influential poetry quarterly Agenda. Dale’s first collection, Walk…

Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to parents from North East England, and grew up in County Durham, where she attended Durham High School for Girls. She graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1982 with a double first in…

Anne Stevenson, inaugural winner of the Northern Rock Writers Award in 2002, was born in England of American parents in 1933 and educated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father was professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. After…

Tom Paulin (b. 1949) is a poet, essayist, editor and lecturer, and a regular panellist on the BBC’s Newsnight Review. He won the Somerset Maugham award for his first Faber collection, A State of Justice, and was awarded a NESTA…

Denise Riley (b. 1948) is active across the full range of poetic life – poet, essayist, teacher, editor, researcher – and beyond, with her interests extending to politics, history, philosophy, feminist theory and visual art. She lectures at the University…