Helen Ivory (born 1969) is an English poet, artist, tutor, and editor.
Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her sixth Bloodaxe Books collection is Constructing a Witch ( 2024), a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation.
In 2024 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Award. Co-judge Moniza Alvi says of her work: "Helen Ivory, a highly individualistic poet and visual artist, conjures a world that is both magical and sharply real."
Ivory edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches online for National Centre for Writing In 2020 she became a Versopolis poet and has work translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek. In 2019, she was named as one of the EDP's 100 Most Inspiring Women.
Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A collection of collage/mixed-media poems entitled Hear What the Moon Told Me was published in 2016 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
In early 2019, SurVison published a chapbook of predominantly surrealist poems titled Maps of the Abandoned City. Reviewing it in London Grip magazine, Rosie Jackson noted "the rare skill Ivory has to make her surrealism float into a world where politics – particularly sexual politics – are still pertinent." [1] The Square of the Clockmaker from this chapbook, was chosen as one of the Poems on the Underground in 2023.
In 1999, Ivory won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. [2]
In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.
Ivory was born in Luton but has lived in Norwich since 1990. She is married to the poet and photographer Martin Figura.
Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet and editor. Of English and Northern Irish ancestry, Adcock lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
Moniza Alvi FRSL is a British-Pakistani writer and poet. She has won several well-known prizes for her verse. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Anne Katharine Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Caitríona O'Reilly is an Irish poet and critic.
Priscilla Muriel McQueen is a New Zealand poet and three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistani-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.
John Agard FRSL is a Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was awarded BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2021.
Sean O'Brien FRSL is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only four poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems.
Jennifer Maiden is an Australian poet. She was born in Penrith, New South Wales, and has had 38 books published: 29 poetry collections, 6 novels and 3 nonfiction works. Her current publishers are Quemar Press in Australia and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. She began writing professionally in the late 1960s and has been active in Sydney's literary scene since then. She took a BA at Macquarie University in the early 1970s. She has one daughter, Katharine Margot Toohey. Aside from writing, Jennifer Maiden runs writers workshops with a variety of literary, community and educational organizations and has devised and co-written a manual of questions to facilitate writing by Torture and Trauma Victims. Later, Maiden and Bennett used the questions they had created as a basis for a clinically planned workbook.
Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Michael Blackburn is a British poet and author. He has been associated with several literary ventures since the 1970s, as an editor, founder and publisher.
Maureen Therese Seaton was an American lesbian poet, memoirist, and professor of creative writing. She authored fifteen solo books of poetry, co-authored an additional thirteen, and wrote one memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, which won the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. Seaton's writing has been described as "unusual, compressed, and surrealistic," and was frequently created in collaboration with fellow poets such as Denise Duhamel, Samuel Ace, Neil de la Flor, David Trinidad, Kristine Snodgrass, cin salach, Niki Nolin, and Mia Leonin.
Maura Dooley is a British poet and writer. She has published five collections of poetry and edited several anthologies. She is the winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 1987 and the Cholmondeley Award in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize in 1997 and again in 2015. Her poetry collections Life Under Water (2008) and Kissing A Bone (1996) were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
SurVision is an international English-language surrealist poetry project, comprising an online magazine and a book-publishing outlet. SurVision magazine, founded in March 2017 by poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky, was a platform for surrealist poetry from Ireland and the world. SurVision Books, the book imprint, started up the following year.
Sasha Dugdale FRSL is a British poet, playwright, editor and translator. She has written six poetry collections and is a translator of Russian literature.
Claire Askew is a Scottish novelist and poet.
Tom de Freston is a visual artist and writer based in Oxford. His work is known for his focus on images of humanity, despair, that ‘convey our most haunted fears about a world struggling for survival’. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film, writing and performance into immersive visceral narratives.