Jacqueline Woods has been a regular at Write Out Loud open-mic nights in the north-west for many years, and more recently at Write Out Loud online events. She says in the foreword to her latest collection, Finding The Words: “I have always loved poetry. It is part of my life, the essence of my being...

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Dale Robinson was a miner at Ellington colliery in Northumberland. It was known as The Big E, extended out under the North Sea, and was the last pit to close in the area, as late as 2005. He worked th...

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It is not often that a poet gets a standing ovation at a poetry festival or indeed if another arrives clutching a collection bucket for the RNLI. But these are strange times and this was Morecambe Poe...

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In his latest collection Derek Sellen takes us on "a journey through darkness to reach the light". He adds in a short introduction that while this may be "a rather cliched pattern, it is also an ancie...

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Alex Josephy lives and writes in East Sussex and Italy.  She has worked as a UK state schoolteacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her published collections include Other Bla...

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Sussex-based poet and playwright Claire Booker has won four Poetry Society members competitions, the 2023 Stanza competition and been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. In 2019 she was gue...

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Poet and novelist Eoghan Walls was born in Derry and educated in Wales and Ireland. He has lived in Germany and Rwanda and now teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of two...

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John Challis’s debut pamphlet Black Cab (Poetry Saltzburg, 2017), was a New Writing North Read Regional title. His first full collection was The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe, 2021). He has been highly c...

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Pamela Gormally lives in Alnwick, Northumberland, and holds an MA in creative writing from Newcastle University. She won first prize in the Sonnet or Not competition 2022 and third prize in the Hippoc...

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Evidence of a disciplined religious upbringing betrays itself in the titles and subject matter of a number of poems at the start of this collection. Elsewhere, there are  echoes of the first lines of ...

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Maggie Mackay is from Dunfermline, and winds family history into her poems. She has been published in a number of print and online poetry magazines and journals. Her previous publications include a pa...

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Polly Atkin is an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. Her previous poetry collections published with Seren include Basic Nest Architecture (20...

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Every year the US poet Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on New Year’s Day. One such poem concludes with the admonition: “Don’t despair of this falling world, not yet …” (‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, Wh...

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The news has become so bad it’s difficult to find the words to write about it. That’s how I feel, sometimes, at least. But luckily Attila the Stockbroker has not been left speechless. The veteran punk...

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“I knock on the door … I count to 45 in my head. I tell them I’m doing an art project, being a bit liberal with the truth. And then I do a poem to introduce myself.” Thus spoke Rowan McCabe, aka the D...

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It’s taken me a while to get round to writing this review of a momentous poetry gathering, but I couldn’t let it go unrecorded. On the last weekend in March around 40 poets and audience gathered at Wo...

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I have seen people physically moved by the ghosts that haunt the Newcastle Lit and Phil Library. One such apparition is said to be the ghost of the legendary Mrs Affleck. On Wednesday night she would ...

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Award-winning poet Tallulah Howarth celebrated the publication of her latest book An Alternative Xanadu this month with two launch events. The first was in her home city of Leeds last week and the Lon...

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Birmingham-based multidisciplinary artist and writer Rupinder Kaur Waraich is a BBC New Creative. Her one-woman show Imperfect, Perfect Woman was performed at Wolverhampton literature festival in 2022...

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This latest collection of poems by Surrey-based writer Jeremy Loynes follows on from his poetry pamphlet Turning which was published by Dempsey & Windle in 2018. In Wise as Water we discover similar p...

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This collection of poems by Adam Horovitz was inspired by the Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology of the Cotswolds exhibited at the Corinium museum, Cirencester, and the prehistoric and Roman artefac...

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Catherine Redford began writing after the early death of her partner and is now widely published. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection, dedicated to the memory of her partner, Rebecca Mar...

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Danish-born writer Pia Tafdrup is the author of over 20 collections of verse, which are often organised into themed sequences. Her latest is a series of five books on the human senses collectively ref...

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Cardiff-born writer, artist and musician Laura Wainwright grew up in Newport where she still lives. She has a PhD in English literature from Cardiff University where her thesis focused on Anglophone W...

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Martin Hayes was born in London and has lived around Edgware Road all his life. This major traffic artery running north from Marble Arch was once part of the Roman road Watling Street. Countless peopl...

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Ivan V Lalić (1931-1996) was born in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. The summers of his childhood were spent in western Serbia, an idyll that came to an abrupt end with the Nazi invasion i...

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Caroline Gill, who currently lives in Suffolk, grew up in London, Kent and Norfolk before moving with David, her archaeologist husband, to Rome, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge and Swansea. She graduat...

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