Charles Bainbridge reviews regularly for the Guardian, mostly poetry; and co-edits the poetry magazine Angel Exhaust. He has published translations and adaptations of the French poet Philippe Soupault in various magazines and pamphlets and has performed them at Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry.

Malika Booker is a writer, spoken word and multidisciplinary artist, whose work spans literature, education and cross-arts. She has appeared world-wide both independently and with the British Council. She was one of the touring poets with Bittersweet in 1999/2000 and since has featured in the spoken word project, Modern Love, and in Kin at the Barbican in 2004 - a show incorporating words, music and visuals. She was commissioned to co-produce a poetry film to commemorate the Royal Festival Hall's 50th Birthday Celebrations in Spring 2001. Her first musical play, Catwalk, commissioned by NITRO, ran at the Tricycle Theatre in June 2001 and had a successful UK tour. 

She was Hampton Court Palace writer in residence in 2004, and is now a commissioned writer for Croydon Museum. In 2005 she undertook a two-month writer fellowship in Delhi, to work on her first novel.  

She is an experienced creative writing course leader and has run courses for various organisations including The Arvon Foundation, National Theatre and the Young Vic. She worked with young people for the Inner-London Teenager Poetry Slam in 2003 and 2004, which resulted in two collections of their writing, Where I'm From, Where I'm Going and The Way We See It, The Way It Is. 

Malika Booker also jointly runs 'Malika's Kitchen', a writers' collective based in London and Chicago. Her latest play, Unplanned, opened in Spring 2007, with a run at Battersea Arts Centre. Her book, Breadfruit, was also published in 2007. 

 

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. A former Arvon Foundation centre Director, a musician and an ecologist, his latest books of poetry are GOOSE MUSIC (with John Burnside, SALT, 2008), THE STORM BERM (tall-lighthouse, 2007) and FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS: Poems 1996-2006 (SALT, 2006). His work is intensely lyrical and driven by a fascination for natural ecology, as well as a passion for formal experimentation. He also writes criticism from an environmental perspective and is passionate about the natural world, especially the sea and birds (sometimes even at the same time). He has also edited several books whose concern is to examine the false divides that exist in poetry today between 'traditional' and 'innovative' poets

 

 

Jane Draycott is a UK-based poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work. Her latest collection Over was published in April by Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is currently shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize. Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree (Carcanet/Oxford) were both Poetry Society Recommendations. Other collections include, from Two Rivers Press, Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a long sequence of poems about London's working river (with paintings by Peter Hay) written while poet-in-residence at the River & Rowing Museum.

Her audio work with Elizabeth James has won several awards including BBC Radio 3 Poem-for-Radio and a London Sound Art Award. Winner of the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize in 2002 and nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets in 2004, she was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner in 2008 and teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

Her contemporary version of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is forthcoming in 2010 from Carcanet/OxfordPoets and is supported by Arts Council England South East.

I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact 'The Night Tree' is the finest collection I've read for ages. - David Morley, The Guardian

Those who enjoyed Jane Draycott's 'Tideway' poems...will know how well she evokes the otherness of the underwater river-world... and it is in this sense that the word 'quiet' should be applied to the chords and modulations of Draycott's eerie and beautiful poems. She listens, and therefore so do we. - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published poems internationally in such journals as The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The Rialto, Shearsman, and The Times Literary Supplement, and one collection, The Tethers, awarded the London Festival Fringe Best New Poetry Award 2010. She also edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, and her pamphlet, The Son, composed largely of prose poems, was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.  A senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, Etter reviews for The Guardian, the TLS, and various literary journals.

Katy Evans-Bush's first collection is Me and the Dead (Salt Publishing, 2008). Her pamphlet Oscar & Henry was published by Rack Press in January 2010, and her collection, Egg Printing Explained, is due out in spring 2011. She is the editor of the online literary magazine Horizon Review, runs the blog Baroque in Hackney, and writes reviews and essays in various publications. Find out more on her website.
 
What People Say
 
"[In] Katy Evans-Bush's impressive sequence... [her] sympathies appear to lie with James... but the wit and playfulness of this collection also acknowledge Wilde's more teasing way with the truth." - Andrew McCulloch, Times Literary Supplement
 
"Seriousness, a subtlety of line, an intelligent sense of uhumour and a seriousness about art" - Clare Pollard, book endorsement

"I couldn’t put it down! Very absorbing and satisfying at many levels." - Ian Duhig, book endorsement

"Her ironised yet romantic fatalism... is a model of edgy wit and restrained emotion." - John Stammers, book endorsement

 

 

 

Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great grand daughter of Sigmund Freud. Her parents separated when she was four, and she lived with both sets of grandparents; London, in term-time and on the Suffolk coast in the holidays until her mother remarried the economist Wynne Godley. She saw her father regularly throughout her childhood and he painted many portraits of her. They often dined in the company of artists, including Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.

Freud was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions from people such as Anthony D'Offay, Jon Snow and Graham Norton. In comparing the making of her poems to the making of her visual art, Freud writes "I think it is the process of dredging, choosing, selecting and rejecting what material is there that is so exciting. Even if I eventually chuck most of it out as unnecessary soft furnishing, that's how I often discover what my subject matter might be."

She didn't begin writing poetry till the late 1990's. Seeing Anne Carson read at Poetry International was an awakening for Freud, as she describes being "electrified by [Carson's] grief. Here was something grand, disturbing, like a horse rearing up on its hind legs in protest." When she did start writing, she enjoyed reading to an audience and attending poetry readings for a number of years and in 2006, Donut Press offered to publish her pamphlet A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose. Her first full collection from Picador appeared shortly afterwards: The Best Man Who Ever Was was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award (Poetry) in the same year.

Freud has been described as a poet who writes with "real gusto". A Guardian review talks about the "obvious delight' that she takes in language, describing The Best Man That Ever Was as a "magpie-like collection of odd and beautiful words and phrases". Freud's poems are chaotic, hectic and witty; are a romp through London, its melancholy and beauty; are a sumptuous tumble through love, appetites and desire. In the filmic 'Interlude for Xylophone, Banjo and Trumpet', our hero receives a phone call in the first stanza which sets him off on a vaguely amphibrachic walk, taking in the noise and the bustle of the city, ending with an unsatisfactory bowl of custard in a cafe served by an 'adorable waitress'.

Vona Groarke has published five collections of poetry, most recently Spindrift (Gallery Books, 2009, Wake Forest University Press 2010), which was a PBS recommendation. She teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Eve Grubin’s book of poems Morning Prayer was published by The Sheep Meadow Press, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, The New Republic, Poetry Review, Poetry International, and other magazines and journals, including Conjunctions, where a chapbook-size group of poems was introduced by Fanny Howe. Her essays have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (U of CA Press, 2009). She has taught at The New School and the City College of New York and worked as Programs Director at The Poetry Society of America for five years. In addition to teaching at the Poetry School, she teaches at NYU in London, and she is the Poet in Residence at the London School of Jewish Studies. She holds an MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and writes a regular column for Poetry International.

In 2008, Jen Hadfield became the youngest person to win the TS Eliot Prize with her collection Nigh-No-Place. Judge Tobias Hill celebrated her "sheer joy of poetry", while fellow judge Andrew Motion commented: "she is a remarkably original poet near the beginning of what is obviously going to be a distinguished career."

Click here to hear a BBC recording of Jen reading from her work. Jen Hadfield was born in Cheshire in 1978 to a Canadian mother and British father. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh and went on to earn an MLitt with distinction from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, tutored by Tom Leonard. In 2003 she won an Eric Gregory Award for the then unpublished Almanacs (Bloodaxe 2005). Leonard describes her as: "A quick mind abroad alone in the ever-changing natural landscape. The language country-rooted, specific, of clear observation: a sophisticated, refreshing country brew", and Katy Evans Bush praises poems for having an "atmosphere of being told by campfire in a field overhung with living stars."

Mimi Khalvati has published six collections with Carcanet Press. In 2006 she received a Cholmondeley Award and her collection The Meanest Flower was a PBS Recommendation. She was co-editor of the Poetry School's three anthologies published by Enitharmon Press, the most recent being I am twenty people! co-edited with Stephen Knight (2007). Mimi is the founder of The Poetry School.

 

 

Roddy Lumsden has published five books of poetry, most recently Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe). Originally from St Andrews, he lives in London where he has taught for City University, Morley College, Metropolitan, City Lit and The Poetry School. He has done editing work on several prize-winning poetry collections and is organiser and host of the reading series BroadCast in London. A popular performer of his work, he has read widely in the UK and the US and in Sweden, Ireland and the Philippines. Former Vice Chair of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, he has been shortlisted for the TS  Eliot Prize and several others and was awarded an International Fellowship at the Banff Center in Ontario in 2001. He has also carried out several residency projects, including being poet-in-residence to the music industry and in a five-star hotel and golf resort. He works as a puzzle and quiz writer and popular reference compiler / editor.

 

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry has featured in a number of magazines including Magma and Poetry Review. His first collection The Hutton Inquiry was published in 2005, his second Zeppelins was recently published by Salt. He has discussed and read his poetry on BBC World Service, featured a poem on the Oxfam CD Lifelines and performs his work regularly. He currently works as Joint Librarian of The Poetry Library and lives in Dagenham with his wife and son.

 

 

John McCullough's poetry has appeared in publications including The Rialto, The Guardian, Ambit, The London Magazine, Magma, Staple and Chroma. He also teaches creative writing at the University of Sussex and the Open University.

He has a Phd in Shakespeare and Friendship from Sussex and lives in Brighton.

His book The Frost Fairs is published by Salt.

 

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield and lives in Cambridge. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse: the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, which was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Spectator, Poetry Review and The Manhattan Review. She received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2007.

 

Visit Daljit Nagra's website for more information, to buy his books, listen to him read his poems and lots more.

Niall O'Sullivan has performed poetry since 1997. His first collection is entitled You're Not Singing Anymore (Waterways, 2004). Niall has hosted the Aromapoetry open mic with Nii Parkes as well as founding and co-hosting New Blood for three years at the Poetry Cafe with James Byrne. Niall hosts London's biggest weekly open mic event, Poetry Unplugged. His second collection, Ventriloquism for Monkeys, was released in the Autumn of 2007.

 

 

Andrew Philip is part of a significant group of younger Scottish poets gaining recognition throughout and beyond the UK. He has published two pamphlets and a full collection of his work, The Ambulance Box (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2010, the Scottish Arts Council first book award 2010 and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2009.

 

About me: I have published three books of poetry, the latest of which 'Look, Clare! Look!' (Bloodaxe, 2005). I have won an Eric Gregory award and was named by the Independent as one of their Top 20 Writers Under 30. My play 'The Weather' (Faber, 2004) was performed at the Royal Court. I have been Managing Editor of The Idler and editor of the poetry journal Reactions, and had journalism published in The Guardian, The Independent, the TES, The Channel 4 Film website, Magma and London Magazine. I have also worked frequently on TV and radio, and my latest documentary 'My Male Muse' (2007) was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. I teach for Arvon and the City Lit. -As a writer, I am very concerned with the idea of bearing witness to the times in which I live. My work has frequently engaged with contemporary concerns - from our confessional media culture in 'Bedtime' to climate change in 'The Weather' and globalisation in 'Look, Clare! Look!'

 

 

Myra Schneider's recent poetry publications are Multiplying The Moon (Enitharmon 2004), Becoming (Second Light Publications 2007) and Circling The Core (Enitharmon 2008) . Other books include Writing My Way Through Cancer, a journal with poems and therapeutic writing ideas (Jessica Kingsley in 2003). She is co-editor of four anthologies of women's poetry, including Images of Women published by Arrowhead Press/SLN in 2006. Writing Your Self (with John Killick), which has a major focus on poetry, was published by Continuum International in November 2009. She was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2007. Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies and she much appreciates the support of Les Murray who has published her poems for many years in the Australian cultural magazine Quadrant. Myra is consultant to the nationwide Second Light Network of Women Poets which promotes women’s poetry and offers many opportunities to its members to develop their work. She contributes articles and reviews regularly to ARTEMISpoetry a comprehensive magazine for women’s poetry. Myra is particularly interested in personal poetry and making connections between the inner and outer world, also in narrative poetry. She also writes about the natural world and the environment. She does many one-off workshops all over the country and is fascinated by the writing process.

Greta Stoddart was born in Henley-on-Thames in 1966, and grew up in Belgium and Oxford. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines and anthologies, and her first collection, At Home in the Dark, was published in 2001. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection).

Her second collection, Salvation Jane (2008), was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

Greta Stoddart lives in East Devon.

I was born in Budapest in late 1948 to a Hungarian Jewish father and a Transylvanian Lutheran mother, or so I thought until she died when it turned out she had been Jewish too. Both had had the experiences Jews were subjected to in the war: both survived having discarded their religion so my brother and I were brought up in an entirely secular environment. In 1956 the family left Hungary, like so many other, by crossing the border illegally into Austria and thence coming to England. I was just eight at the time. I went to school in London, then studied painting, working as an artist as well as poet for a number years. The poetry began in my last two years at school. I went through the usual process of rejection and disappointment until, at the age of 30 my first book appeared in 1979 and was joint-winner of the Faber Prize. By that time my writing had undergone various changes and in some respects the poet I was then would still be recognised to be the poet I am now. The major change since then has been my return visits to Hungary since 1984 that, more than anything, altered my perspective on history and the beauty and fragility of life. Or rather, while I was aware of these things before, they now assumed specific shape. The poems became longer, more architectural, more culturally aware, I suppose. I also became more overtly aware of language, its oddity, its incapacity, its odd commonality, the way it both linked and divided people. I had begun the long enterprise of translation, something that still engages me on a daily basis. The otherness of words led me to more experimentation with form but always with a deep awareness that this was no theoretical field but a fully human enterprise, engaged with human acts, human experiences, in a society of human beings, not ideas. The books continued to appear and generally did well, being short-listed for and, occasionally, winning prizes, most notably the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2004. Being a productive writer the New and Collected Poems of November 2008 comprises some 450 pages. I have also loved writing for children and working with composers as well as artists, so hop to be able to publish a body of work in those areas.

 

 

Robert Vas Dias is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, has edited four literary journals and the anthology Inside Outer Space (NY: Doubleday), and has been editor-publisher of Permanent Press since 1972. He has organised poetry festivals, readings and conferences and has curated exhibitions in both countries, most recently for Gresham College and Central Saint Martins, and taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Programme of Antioch University in London. His collection Leaping Down to Earth, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick, was published in 2008, The Lascaux Variations, with images by John Wright, appeared in 2009, and his latest full-length book, Still ' Life, will be published by Shearsman in Spring, 2010.

Jeffrey Wainwright's Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) and Out of the Air (1999) are published by Carcanet Press. His critical writing includes book on the purposes and styles of poetry, Poetry the Basics (2004), Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, (2006), and he has translated plays by P'guy, Claudel, Corneille and Bernard-Marie Kolt's. His new book of poems, Clarity or Death! will be published by Carcanet in 2008. He lives in Manchester where he teaches English at Manchester Metropolitan University.

 

Tamar Yoseloff was born in the U.S. in 1965. Her first collection, Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press, 1998) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the Aldeburgh Festival Prize. She received a New Writers' Award from London Arts for her second collection in progress, which was later published as Barnard's Star (Enitharmon Press, 2004). In 2005 she was Writer in Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as part of their Year in Literature Festival. Her third collection, Fetch, was published by Salt in 2007, as was Marks, an artist book collaboration with Linda Karshan published by Pratt Contemporary Editions. She is also the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology (Salt 2007) and the poetry editor of Art World Magazine. She is currently working on her first novel.