Matthew Hollis: poetry, place and the life of Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis’s writing moves between poetry and biography, and between the experience of a landscape and the history it carries. His first full-length collection, Ground Water, appeared in 2004; his 2011 biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, brought the life of another poet into sharp focus. Alongside his own books, Hollis has worked as an editor, helping to shape the publication of new poetry at Faber and Faber.

From Norwich to poetry publishing

Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971. He studied at the universities of Edinburgh and York, then built a career combining writing and editorial work. In 2001, he took part in the Arts Council’s “First Lines” programme as a member of the British Council. He joined Faber and Faber in 2002 and helped devise its Faber New Poets series, an editorial initiative that gave his publishing work a place alongside his own writing.

Hollis became Faber’s poetry editor in 2012 and held the role until retiring from it in 2023. The post placed him within a major British publishing house at a time when his work as a poet and biographer was also developing. He has also worked as a tutor for the London Poetry School. These roles connect the making and editing of poetry with its teaching and publication: Hollis’s career has encompassed both the individual book and the wider structures through which poetry reaches readers.

Ground Water: a first collection

Bloodaxe Books published Ground Water, Hollis’s first full-length poetry collection, in 2004. Its reception was marked by several shortlists and a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Guardian First Book Award—whose shortlist had not previously included a poetry book—and the Whitbread Poetry Award. Those distinctions established the collection in a conversation that reached beyond poetry’s own awards.

The collection’s title suggests what runs beneath the visible surface, and the original account of Hollis’s poems describes landscape and emotion as closely linked. Nature is presented not merely as scenery but as part of the poems’ human concerns. Memory, history and experience are among the themes associated with the work, while the landscapes described include rural and urban Britain. Read together, those elements make place a way of attending to what people remember and experience, rather than a decorative setting.

The original account also places Hollis in relation to a broader British poetic tradition, naming Wordsworth and Hughes as points of comparison. That comparison is best understood as context, not as a claim that Hollis simply repeats their approach. His first collection was recognised through its shortlisting for awards, while his later work took another route into literary history: a sustained account of a poet whose life and writing had their own relationship to place and time.

Edward Thomas and the roads to France

Hollis’s Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas was published in 2011. It turns from lyric poetry to biography, focusing on the final years of Edward Thomas, an English poet of the early twentieth century. The book received the 2011 Costa Book Award for Biography and the H. W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize. The Costa judges described it as “dramatic and engrossing” and called it “a brilliant biography that moved us all”.

The subject gives Hollis a way to bring biography and poetry into the same frame. Thomas’s life is not treated as separate from his writing: the book’s subtitle makes its focus on his last years explicit, while its title points towards France. The original account characterises the study as connecting past and present. The award recognition confirms the book’s success as biography, and its attention to a poet links Hollis’s biographical work to the questions of poetic life and literary memory that also inform his own career.

Hollis’s books extend beyond these two works. His later writing includes Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, published by Faber and Faber on 13 October 2022. The book takes a poem as its subject, continuing his engagement with literary history through a different form from either a poetry collection or a life of a poet. It was named a book of the year by the Sunday Times, the New Statesman and the Financial Times.

Writing, editing and teaching

Hollis’s work at Faber began before his appointment as poetry editor. Joining the publisher in 2002, he helped devise the Faber New Poets series; a decade later he took on the poetry editorship. The sequence matters: his publishing career involved both developing a series and later holding responsibility for the poetry list. He remained in the role until 2023, while continuing to write.

His teaching at the London Poetry School provides another setting for that work. Together, editing and tutoring place Hollis in contact with poetry not only as a finished book but as a practice that is developed, selected and shared. The available account does not specify particular students or editorial decisions, so his contribution is most clearly described through the roles he held and the series he helped devise. His own writing supplies a parallel record: from Ground Water to the books on Edward Thomas and Waste Land, he has returned to the ways poetry is made, read and remembered.

Why Matthew Hollis deserves a place in British Legacy

Matthew Hollis belongs in British Legacy because his career brings together three distinct contributions to the country’s literary life. As a poet, he published Ground Water, a first full-length collection recognised by the Forward, Guardian and Whitbread award shortlists and by the Poetry Book Society. As an editor, he helped devise Faber’s New Poets series, became the publisher’s poetry editor in 2012 and served in that post until 2023. As a biographer, he wrote Now All Roads Lead to France, a Costa-winning account of Edward Thomas’s final years. These are specific achievements, not simply a general association with British poetry.

The value of that combination lies in how it connects making literature with preserving and transmitting it. Hollis’s poems attend to landscape, memory and human experience; his biography brings a past poet’s life and work to readers; his editorial and teaching roles contribute to the settings in which poetry is published and studied. His books also show more than one way of writing literary history: through poems of his own, through a poet’s life, and through the biography of a poem in Waste Land. Born in Norwich, educated at British universities and active in British publishing and teaching, Hollis’s connection to this legacy is grounded in both place and work. His record offers a substantial account of contemporary literary practice across poetry, biography, editing and education.

Sources

Matthew Hollis — Wikipedia revision 1372389926

Adapted in part from Matthew Hollis by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.