Catherine Byron is an Irish poet who often collaborates with visual and sound artists. Her first book of poetry, Settlements, appeared in 1985, and she has since published five collections, the most recent being The Getting of Vellum (which was…

An internationally exhibiting artist as well as a poet, Heather Phillipson received an Eric Gregory Award in 2008 and has since published three books of poetry: a pamphlet with Faber & Faber in 2009 (part of the Faber New Poets…

Knowing, precise and often cheerfully acerbic, Connie Bensley’s poems revel in poking gentle fun at the self-deceptions and delusions of middle-class suburban life. Whether she brings her lapidary and resolutely unadorned words to bear on our misplaced hopes and fears,…

Jane Weir is an Anglo-Italian writer and designer. She has published two poetry collections with Templar – a third, Anna Magnani, Eat with Me, is published in 2016 – and two pamphlets, Alice (2006) and Signs of Early Man (2009),…

Dick Davis, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been hailed by the TLS as ‘our finest translator of Persian poetry’, and retired in 2012 from the Ohio State University where he was Professor of Persian and Chair…

In its insistent rhythms and vivid parsing of postcolonial histories, Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry is among the most significant to emerge from the West Indies in the last century. Born in Barbados in 1930, Brathwaite won a scholarship to study at…

Jonathan Edwards was born in Newport, South Wales and grew up in Crosskeys. He received a BA in English and American Literature and an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, and now teaches English at a secondary school…

Tim Liardet was born in London in 1959 and educated at the University of York and characterises his early route to poetry as “…long, and circuitous, fraught with the exactions of wrong jobs, self-doubt and the occasional suggestion of a…

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, came to England when she was a few months old, and grew up in Hatfield. The experience she describes in her recording of ‘growing up… and feeling half-Pakistani… on the edge of things’…

M. R. Peacocke grew up in South Devon in a musical family. She read English at Oxford, but spent more time on a capella singing and playing the oboe than on literary studies. After years of teaching, travel, marriage, bringing…

John McAuliffe was born in 1973, and grew up in Listowel, County Kerry. He studied at NUI Galway, and has since 2002 lived in the UK, where he co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He…

Richard Murphy has been called a poet of two traditions, British and Irish. Born in 1927 at Milford, a small “Big House” of his mother’s Anglo-Irish family near Kilmaine, County Mayo, Richard spent five of his childhood years in the British…

C. H. Sisson died in 2003 at the age of 89. He was known as a critic, political theorist, poet, novelist, and translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly….

Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s more softly spoken bards, but his particular Celtic muse is no less intense for all his quieter rhetorical flourishes and domestic asides. Indeed, his poetry has an affecting immediacy which comes from its easy…

“Poetry now, every bit as much as in the Romantic age, is a utopian demonstration, by aesthetic means, of what true freedom would be like. It engages us to imagine something better than what at present we are afflicted with;…

Inventive, irreverent and comic, Ross Sutherland (b. 1979) is a force of nature on the UK spoken word scene. Alongside Luke Wright, he was one of the founding members of Aisle 16, a stand-up collective and irony-soaked ‘poetry boyband’ which,…

Oli Hazzard’s first book, Between Two Windows, was published by Carcanet in 2012. It won the Michael Murphy Prize for a first collection and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was a book of the year in the Financial Times, Guardian…

Malika Ndlovu is a South African poet who has performed her work across the globe. With a background in both theatre and arts management Ndlovu is a prolific creative facilitator, working with numerous visual artists, culture organizations, heritage institutions and…