Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin.
Patience Agbabi FRSL is a British poet and performer who emphasizes the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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.
Alexander David Turner is an English musician. He is the front man and lead singer-songwriter of the rock band Arctic Monkeys. Turner is known for his lyricism ranging from kitchen sink realism to surrealist wordplay, which has been praised by music critics and the public. All but one of Turner's studio albums have topped the UK Albums Chart. He has won seven Brit Awards, an Ivor Novello Award, and a Mercury Prize among other accolades.
The Cholmondeley Awards are annual awards for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966. Since 1991 the award has been made to four poets each year, to the total value of £8000.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistan-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.
The Ilkley Literature Festival is a literature festival held annually in Ilkley, Yorkshire. Inaugurated in 1973 by the poet W. H. Auden and until 1988 held every two years, the festival is the oldest and largest of its type in the north of England.
The Jaipur Literature Festival, or JLF, is an annual literary festival which takes place in the Indian city of Jaipur each year in the month of January. It was founded in 2006.
Book of Matches is a poetry book written by Simon Armitage, first published in 1993 by Faber and Faber. It was admired by critics and has been used in English literature examinations.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, a large-scale international festival of literature held every year in October in the English spa town of Cheltenham, and part of Cheltenham Festivals: also responsible for the Jazz, Music, and Science Festivals that run every year.
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.
Donna Masini is a poet and novelist who was born in Brooklyn and lives in New York City.
Huddersfield Literature Festival (HLF) is an annual literary festival that takes place in March in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England.
The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is an international literature festival held annually in the United Arab Emirates. The festival is held under the patronage of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, under the auspices of the Emirates Literature Foundation and is run by Ahlam Bolooki. The festival's offices are located within the Dubai International Writers' Centre.
Kwame Alexander is American poet, educator, publisher, Emmy® Award-winning producer, and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 40 books, including poetry, memoir, and children's fiction. His mission is to change the world, one word at a time.
WORD Christchurch is an organisation based in Christchurch, New Zealand which presents a variety of events around books, stories and ideas, most notably the annual WORD Christchurch Festival, also known as WORD Festival, established in 1997, then known as Books and Beyond. Until 2014, the festival was run as the Press Christchurch Writers Festival.
Chris Price is a poet, editor and creative writing teacher. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Verb Wellington is an organisation that since 2014 has run an annual literary festival in Wellington, New Zealand called Verb Writers and Readers Festival. It was founded by Claire Mabey. Part of the festival is an event called LitCrawl which is like a pub crawl, across many venues. In addition to the festival, Verb Wellington run other events; for example, it partnered with the British Council in 2023 to bring together Chris Tse and Simon Armitage at an event called Does Literature Matter? at the National Library of New Zealand.
