Face to face

Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor with many years experience of promoting contemporary poetry. He founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. In 2008 he stepped down as Chairman, but continues to be associated with the Festival as an honorary consultant. He also founded the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman in 1991 and since Roy's death in 2002 has been editing it with Joanna Cutts. As a poet he has published four collections and three pamphlets ' Cloves of Garlic (1988), which won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, In the Fruit Cage (1997) and Living by the Sea (2007). His first two collections were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness (Peterloo, 1991) and The Tightrope Wedding (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Permission to Breathe (Smith/Doorstop, 2004) was followed by The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2008). In the spring of 2005 he was awarded an Arts Council International Writing Fellowship at the Banff Centre in Canada.