Michael Longley: Poetry, memory and the landscapes of Ireland
The Belfast-born poet brought classical learning to poems shaped by place, loss and the moral complexities of conflict.
Read the entrySearch
2,879 entries
Simon Armitage: poetry rooted in Yorkshire, open to the world
From Marsden and the Pennine Way to the Poet Laureate’s library tours, Simon Armitage has carried poetry into public places and everyday life.
Read the entry
Carol Ann Duffy: poetry in public life
From Glasgow-born poet to the first woman and first Scottish-born holder of the Poet Laureate title, Duffy made room for distinctive voices in British poetry.
Read the entry
Michael Symmons Roberts: poetry, faith and the life of words
From Lancashire and the BBC to award-winning collections, opera and broadcasting, Roberts’s work brings poetry into conversation with belief, science and public life.
Read the entry
R. S. Thomas: the Welsh poet of place, faith and independence
An Anglican priest as well as a poet, Thomas wrote of rural Welsh life, national identity and the difficulty of belief.
Read the entry
Norman MacCaig: the poet between Edinburgh and Assynt
A Scottish poet and teacher, MacCaig joined lucid, often humorous verse to a lifelong attention to place, language and the natural world.
Read the entry
U. A. Fanthorpe: poetry attentive to ordinary lives
After 16 years teaching English, Fanthorpe found a poetic voice in the people and experiences she encountered in hospital work.
Read the entry
David Harsent: poetry, crime fiction and the stage
The English poet’s award-winning collections sit alongside a career in television writing, crime novels and music theatre.
Read the entry
Gavin Ewart: the poet who made light verse serious
From his teenage debut in New Verse to collections spanning five decades, Ewart brought wit, erotic candour and close attention to human behaviour to British poetry.
Read the entry
Clive James: the Australian writer who made Britain his home
Poet, critic and broadcaster, James brought a distinctive wit to British television and letters over a career spanning more than five decades.
Read the entry
Christopher Reid: poetry from playful invention to grief
The British poet’s inventive books range from Martian transformations of the everyday to the elegy of A Scattering.
Read the entry
Paul Farley
The Liverpool-born poet whose collections include The Ice Age and The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You.
Read the entry
Matthew Hollis: Poetry, publishing and the life of Edward Thomas
From Ground Water to award-winning biography, Matthew Hollis’s work connects contemporary poetry with the writers and histories that shaped it.
Read the entry
Robin Robertson: a Scottish poet in London
From his debut collection to the award-winning narrative poem The Long Take, Robertson’s career joins Scottish beginnings with a working life in British publishing.
Read the entry
David Constantine: poet, storyteller and translator
From Oxford and Durham universities to award-winning stories, Constantine’s work joins English writing with a sustained engagement in European literature.
Read the entry
P. J. Kavanagh: poet, memoirist and man of many parts
An English poet, actor and broadcaster, Kavanagh wrote about grief, memory and family while building a varied career in British literary life.
Read the entry
Edwin Morgan: a poet of formal freedom and Glasgow life
From concrete poetry to translations and love poems, Edwin Morgan brought a restless range of voices to Scottish writing.
Read the entry
James Fenton: poetry, politics and the reporting of war
The English poet and journalist brought close observation of political conflict into a varied body of poems, reportage, criticism and theatre writing.
Read the entry
Moniza Alvi: poetry across histories and identities
Born in Lahore and raised in England, Moniza Alvi has built a body of poetry that moves between personal identity, cultural inheritance and the histories that shape both.
Read the entry
Kit Wright: poetry for adults and children
The English poet and children’s author built a varied career across books, education and the Poetry Society.
Read the entry
Tom Paulin: poetry, politics and the sound of language
The poet, critic and broadcaster has made Northern Ireland’s histories and contested voices central to a wide-ranging literary career.
Read the entry
Dannie Abse: Welsh poet, physician and chronicler of identity
Born in Cardiff, Abse brought his medical life and Jewish and Welsh inheritances into a wide-ranging body of poetry, memoir, fiction and drama.
Read the entry
Matthew Sweeney: an Irish poet in a wider European world
From Donegal to London, Timișoara, Berlin and Cork, Sweeney made poetry from the strange and the everyday.
Read the entry
Ian Hamilton: Poet, Critic and Editor
From concise poems to influential magazines, Hamilton shaped British literary debate as a writer, editor and critic.
Read the entry
Peter Porter: the Australian poet who made Britain his home
Brisbane-born Peter Porter built a distinctive literary career in Britain, moving from early satire to elegiac poetry and earning major recognition on both sides of the world.
Read the entry
Fleur Adcock: a life between New Zealand and Britain
The poet’s clear-eyed writing explored place, relationships and divided identity across a career spanning more than six decades.
Read the entry
Eavan Boland: poetry, women and Irish history
The Irish poet connected private lives with national memory, bringing women’s experience into accounts of history and identity.
Read the entry
Elizabeth Jennings: faith, form and the life of a poet
From her childhood in Lincolnshire and Oxford to award-winning collections, Jennings made lyric poetry a way of exploring belief, time and human experience.
Read the entry
Helen Dunmore: the poet who moved between worlds
From wartime Cornwall and Leningrad to the final poems of Inside the Wave, Dunmore brought poetry, fiction and children’s writing into a distinctive conversation.
Read the entry
Glyn Maxwell: poetry, plays and the life of form
From Welwyn Garden City to stages and classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, the poet has carried a formal approach across poetry, drama and opera.
Read the entry
Edward Thomas: the poet who made the English countryside speak
A prolific critic and nature writer, Thomas began writing poetry at 36. “Adlestrop” and his poems of landscape and war secured his place in twentieth-century literature.
Read the entry
George Mackay Brown: the poet who made Orkney his subject
From Stromness newspaper columns to novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Mackay Brown drew on island life, history and legend.
Read the entry
Vikram Seth: a writer between literary worlds
From Oxford and Tonbridge to novels and poems shaped by India and elsewhere, Vikram Seth has built a career across languages, forms and places.
Read the entry
Hugo Williams: the poet who made the personal his subject
From the spare poems of his early career to the autobiographical candour of Billy’s Rain, Williams brought intimacy, wit and precision to British poetry.
Read the entry
Louis MacNeice
The Irish poet and BBC writer whose clear-eyed work joined private doubt to public crisis.
Read the entry
Charles Causley: the Cornish poet who joined folklore and war
A Royal Navy veteran and teacher, Causley wrote poems for adults and children in a direct, memorable voice rooted in Launceston and Cornwall.
Read the entry
Siegfried Sassoon: the soldier-poet who challenged the war
Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, Sassoon turned his experience of trench warfare into poetry that exposed its human cost and questioned the conduct of the conflict.
Read the entry
Paul Muldoon: poetry made of wit, riddles and history
The Northern Irish poet’s intricate work spans the Troubles, Oxford and Princeton, and includes the Pulitzer-winning collection Moy Sand and Gravel.
Read the entry
John Fuller: poet, novelist and publisher
From his first poetry collection to the Sycamore Press, John Fuller has worked across poetry, fiction, criticism and publishing.
Read the entry
Imtiaz Dharker: poetry across borders and belonging
Poet, artist and filmmaker Imtiaz Dharker brings questions of home, displacement and identity into British poetry and public life.
Read the entry