Michael Laskey | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
Occupation(s) | Poet and editor |
Children | three sons, including actor Jack Laskey |
Michael George Laskey (born 15 August 1944) is an English poet and editor.
Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Laskey was educated at Gresham's School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read English. After Cambridge, Laskey worked for ten years as a teacher in secondary schools and further education in Spain and England. [1]
Laskey has published four poetry collections, including New & Selected Poems (2008), and three pamphlets. [1] In 1999 Laskey was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for his collection The Tightrope Wedding. [2]
In 1989, Laskey founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and served as its director for ten years. He subsequently became chairman of The Poetry Trust (the organisation that runs the Festival), 2003–2008. In 1991, with Roy Blackman he founded the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll , and since 2002 has edited it (with Joanna Cutts). In 2005 he was awarded an Arts Council International Writing Fellowship at the Banff Centre in Canada. [1]
Laskey now works as a freelance writer, running workshops and teaching creative writing for many organisations. including the University of East Anglia, the Arvon Foundation, the Open College of the Arts, and in schools.
Laskey is married to a general practitioner, and they have three sons, including the actor Jack Laskey. Since 1978, they have lived in Suffolk. [1]
Tim Liardet is a poet twice nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, a critic, and Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University.
Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet and poetic translator.
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.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
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.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist.
Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.
Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet.
Colette Bryce is a poet, freelance writer, and editor. She was a Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003 to 2005, and a North East Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 2005 to 2007. She was the Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 2009 to 2013. In 2019 Bryce succeeded Eavan Boland as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.
Daljit Nagra is a British poet whose debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! – a title alluding to W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and by epigraph also to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" – was published by Faber in February 2007. Nagra's poems relate to the experience of Indians born in the UK, and often employ language that imitates the English spoken by Indian immigrants whose first language is Punjabi, which some have termed "Punglish". He currently works part-time at JFS School in Kenton, London, and visits schools, universities and festivals where he performs his work. He was appointed chair of the Royal Society of Literature in November 2020. He is a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London.
Donna Hilbert is an American poet who also writes short stories, plays, and essays. She was a founding member of the Progressive Dinner Party in Long Beach, California, and she is also known for her commitment to progressive politics and community arts programs.
Carole Bromley is a British poet, and creative writing tutor for the University of York.
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.
Dorothy Nimmo was an English poet, winner of the Cholmondeley Award in 1996.
Helen Mort is a British poet and novelist. She is a five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007, and won the Manchester Poetry Prize Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. In the same year she was shortlisted for the Picador Prize and won the Norwich Café Writers' Poetry Competition with a poem called "Deer". She was the Derbyshire Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. In 2014, she won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for "Division Street".
J. O. Morgan is an author from Edinburgh, Scotland. The seventh of his volumes of verse, The Martian's Regress (2020), is set in the far future, when humans "lose their humanity." He has also published two novels: Pupa (2021) and Appliance (2022).
Claire Crowther is a British poet and author of five full-length poetry collections, Stretch of Closures, The Clockwork Gift, On Narrowness, Solar Cruise and A Pair of Three and six pamphlets, Knithoard, Bare George, Silents, Incense, Mollicle, and Glass Harmonica. Crowther is Deputy and Reviews Editor of Long Poem Magazine.
Niall Campbell, is a Scottish poet. He has published two poetry collections and a poetry pamphlet. He was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award in 2011, winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2014, and was recipient of the Saltire First Book of the Year award.
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet and writer. Her debut collection The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions was nominated for the Aldeburgh Prize. Works since then include If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women and A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller.