Face to face

Martin Figura is a poet, teacher, retired army major, qualified accountant (winner of the 1976 RAPC Apprentice College Accounting Prize), Randy Newman fan and photographer; but mostly a poet.

He’s a proud member of the Joy of Six, with whom he’s performed from New York to Cromer since 2000. He’s also proud to be an Apples & Snakes associate artist and they produced his show Whistle which received a major Arts Council Lottery Fund Award in 2010 and is shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Most of all he’s proud to be married to Bloodaxe poet Helen Ivory.

During 2010 he produced two books: Whistle with Arrowhead and Boring the Arse Off Young People, an entirely different concoction of funny poems with the fine people at Nasty Little Press. He performed Whistle at Ledbury Poetry Festival and Freeword Flow Festival and will start touring it in 2011. His poem ‘Victor’ won the Poetry Society’s 2010 Hamish Canham Prize.

He is chair of Café Writers and comperes it with varying degrees of incompetence in Norwich every month. He’s also a founder member of Norwich Poetry Club, another monthly live lit event in this fine city.

He’s taught poetry & photography (sometimes both at once) and performance to students from reception classes, MA Groups, support groups, prisoners, excluded pupils and all sorts of other people. He has an MA, with Distinction, in ‘Writing the Visual’ from the then Norwich School of Art & Design.