Matthew Hollis: Poetry, publishing and the life of Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis’s writing moves between the close attention of a poet and the wider frame of literary history. His first full-length collection, Ground Water, brought poetry to the shortlist of a major first-book award; his biography of Edward Thomas later won the Costa Book Award. Alongside his own books, Hollis has worked in British publishing, helping develop new poets and editing poetry at Faber and Faber.

A poet from Norwich

Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971. He studied at the universities of Edinburgh and York, and his working life has combined writing with editorial and teaching roles. He joined Faber and Faber in 2002, where he helped devise the Faber New Poets series. In 2012 he became the publisher’s poetry editor, a position he held until retiring from the role in 2023. He has also served as a tutor for the London Poetry School and taken part in the British Council’s cultural and educational work, including the Arts Council’s First Lines programme in 2001.

These roles place Hollis in more than one part of the literary world. He has made books as a poet and biographer, but has also worked on the conditions in which other poets reach readers. The Faber New Poets series and his later editorial work belong to that less visible side of a literary career: choosing, shaping and publishing poetry as well as writing it.

Ground Water and a first collection

Published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004, Ground Water was Hollis’s first full-length collection. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Its Guardian First Book Award shortlist place was notable: the Wikipedia account describes it as the first time a poetry book had been shortlisted for that award.

The collection’s title suggests a meeting between the visible landscape and what lies beneath it. The earlier account of Hollis’s work also emphasises nature, human connection and the passage of time, and describes the poems as bringing landscape into relation with human feeling. Those are broad descriptions rather than a substitute for reading the poems themselves, but they point to the book’s central appeal: its attention to how a particular place or moment can carry more than its immediate surface.

The recognition was significant for a first collection, but it was not the end of Hollis’s work in poetry. His career continued across original writing, editorial responsibilities and teaching. That range makes Ground Water both an early achievement and a starting point for understanding his sustained engagement with the form.

Edward Thomas and the making of a biography

Hollis’s 2011 book Now All Roads Lead to France turns from a collection of poems to the life of a poet. It follows the final years of Edward Thomas, the English poet whose writing and experience were shaped by the First World War. The book also gives attention to Thomas’s friendship with the American poet Robert Frost, a relationship that brings a personal dimension to its account of literary lives and influences.

The biography received the Costa Book Award for Biography in 2011 and the H. W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize. Hollis’s account of Thomas connects an individual life with the circumstances in which his work was written. Its subject is not simply a career in verse: it is the pressure of war on a writer, and the friendships and decisions that help explain the person behind the poems.

That combination of biography and poetry gives Hollis a distinctive place in the story of Thomas’s reputation. He has written about a major figure in English poetry while remaining a poet himself. The two activities meet in a shared attention to language and to the particulars of a life, although biography also asks for a different kind of structure: evidence arranged across time, rather than experience rendered in a poem.

Publishing poetry and returning to the poem

Hollis’s editorial career at Faber ran alongside his own writing. Joining the publisher in 2002, he helped devise the Faber New Poets series before becoming poetry editor ten years later. He left that role in 2023. The span of this work matters because it shows a sustained contribution to poetry beyond his own publications: helping create a series for new writers and then taking responsibility for a major publisher’s poetry list.

His work as a tutor for the London Poetry School adds another strand to that contribution. Teaching and publishing are different from writing a collection or biography, but both bring poetry into contact with readers and writers. The available account gives no detail about particular students or editorial decisions, so the significance lies in the documented roles themselves, not in claims about individual influence.

In 2022, Faber published Hollis’s Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. The book takes a poem rather than a poet’s life as its subject. It was named a book of the year by the Sunday Times, the New Statesman and the Financial Times. After writing about Edward Thomas, Hollis thus returned to literary history through the close study of a single work, extending his interest from the making of poetry to the histories that gather around it.

Why Matthew Hollis deserves a place in British Legacy

Matthew Hollis deserves a place in British Legacy for a body of work that brings together poetry, literary biography and the practical stewardship of writing. Ground Water established him as a poet whose first collection received recognition from several prominent awards. Now All Roads Lead to France made a different but related contribution: it brought the final years of Edward Thomas into focus, including the poet’s friendship with Robert Frost and the impact of war on his life and work. Its awards acknowledge the achievement of that biography, while its subject connects Hollis’s writing to a formative period in English literary history.

His legacy also includes work carried out beyond the books bearing his name. At Faber and Faber, Hollis helped devise the Faber New Poets series, later served as poetry editor for more than a decade, and remained involved in teaching through the London Poetry School. These are specific ways in which his career has supported poetry’s passage from writer to reader. His later book on The Waste Land continues that engagement with literary history, this time centred on the biography of a poem. Taken together, these achievements show a British literary career built not around one role or title, but around creating, interpreting, publishing and teaching poetry.

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.