Face to face

Ros Barber is author of verse novel The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre, 2012) and three collections of poetry; two with Anvil, the most recent (Material, 2008) a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

She began her education with two firsts, following a BSc in Biology at Sussex with a BA in English Literature & Philosophy with the Open University. After working for some time in IT (as a computer programmer and systems analyst for such companies as American Express, BT and BP) she completed her education with an MA in ‘Creative Writing, the Arts and Education’ and a DPhil in English Literature. Along the way she married twice and had four children.

Since 2000 she has undertaken numerous public art commissions, including poems for the Dover to Folkestone cycle path, Herne Bay’s Seaside Sonnets for Canterbury City Council, the Compton Skyline Project (Brighton), a poetry trail in Wantage, Oxfordshire, and the Embassy Court sonnets for Architecture Week 2002. A book of narrative poems for the Isle of Sheppey was short-listed for SEEDA’s Award for Art in Public Places 2004.

She has been featured three times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb (including Pick of the Year) & read poems on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. An edition of the ITV arts programme The Frame, about the artistic community centred on Embassy Court in Brighton, featured her sonnet sequence on the building. She has had poems published in Faber, Virago, Forward, and Seren anthologies, including Faber’s Poems of the Decade, and her short fiction has been published by Bloomsbury and Serpents Tail. Her poems have also appeared in The Guardian & the Independent on Sunday. Her writing residencies include Arts Council England offices & the Gulbenkian-winning Pallant House Gallery. She gratefully acknowledges the support not only of Arts Council England but of The Authors Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council; all three have, at critical times, awarded her significant grants and bursaries.

She has taught creative writing to both adults and children since 1996, in schools, museums, libraries, and festivals. She has over a decade’s experience of teaching creative writing at the University of Sussex on undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She is the founder of Be the Writer you Dream of Being, running unique ‘breakthrough’ workshops and courses for writers which focus not on writing, but on teaching simple techniques to dissolve the creative blocks, fears, limiting beliefs and negative self-talk that stand in the way of success.

As Dr Rosalind Barber, she is also author of a number of academic articles on Christopher Marlowe, and on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, and has given papers on these topics at conferences at Queens University Belfast, the University of Sussex, the Institute of Ideas, and The Globe Theatre in London.