Polly Rowena Atkin FRSL (born 1980) is an English poet and non-fiction writer based in Grasmere, Cumbria.
Polly Rowena Atkin FRSL (born 1980) is an English poet and non-fiction writer based in Grasmere, Cumbria.
Atkin was born in 1980 in Nottingham [1] and grew up there, then lived seven years in East London before moving north. [2] She has a PhD (2010) from Lancaster University, for which her thesis was "A place re-imagined : the cultural, literacy and spacial making of Dove Cottage, Grasmere". [3] She has an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, [4] for which her thesis was "Writing the Body Well: Poetry and Illness". [5]
Atkin taught English and creative writing at Lancaster University from 2010 to 2014, and at the University of Strathclyde from 2014 to 2017, and has since taught creative writing at the universities of Lancaster and Cumbria. [5]
Atkin's pamphlet bone song was shortlisted for the first Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets, in 2009. [6] Her second pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches (2013), won the Mslexia pamphlet prize, [1] [7] and was shortlisted for the 2014 Lakeland Book of the Year. [8]
Her first book-length collection, Basic Nest Architecture, was published in 2017; it was divided into three sections, with poems relating to her move from London to the Lake district, earlier places and topics, and her current experience of living with chronic illness. [9] [10] It included several poems which had previously won prizes or been shortlisted in competitions. [11]
In 2018, Atkin was writer in residence at Gladstone's Library. [12] In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was awarded a Northern Writers Award for Poetry, and said of it "This award not only offers creative encouragement when I really need it, but financial support which will make continuing to create possible. It has saved my year." [13]
Atkin's 2021 biography of Dorothy Wordsworth, Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth, draws on Dorothy's letters and unpublished diaries and "argues for Dorothy's place in the writing of illness". [14] [15] It was longlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize for books by ill or disabled writers. [16] Her 2021 poetry collection Much With Body was described in Wales Arts Review as "an exploration of pain and illness refracted through the geographical lens of the Lake District, and the often overlooked writings of Dorothy Wordsworth". [17]
Her 2023 memoir Some of Us Just Fall won the 2024 Lakeland Book of the Year. [18] It has been described as "a raw and exquisite meditation on chronic illness and our place within the landscape", [19] "An empowered and patient story, at times murky and tedious, but still poignant", [20] and "Essentially ... a book about bearing the unbearable". [21]
She is a founder and director of The Gravestone Project, "a digital humanities collective that brings together scholars, taphophiles, students, writers, teachers, and others interested in history, literature, and the arts, to think about the various ways that people memorialize the dead". [22]
She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. [23]
Atkin has one of the Ehlers–Danlos syndromes and genetic haemochromatosis, and writes and talks about living with chronic illness especially in relation to rural life and access to nature. [2] She was a speaker at the 2023 Kendal Mountain Festival [24] but published an open letter criticising the announcement that the festival's events would not be filmed that year, announced as an "enrichment" at short notice, arguing that this deprived many people, because of disability, geography, finance or other barriers, of the joy of access to the festival whose theme, that year, was "joy". [25]
Atkins lives in Grasmere, Cumbria. In 2023 she and her partner Will Smith bought Sam Read's, Grasmere's independent bookshop established in 1887, where Smith had worked since 2012. [26] [27] [28]
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Cumbria is a ceremonial county in North West England. It borders the Scottish council areas of Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders to the north, Northumberland and County Durham to the east, North Yorkshire to the south-east, Lancashire to the south, and the Irish Sea to the west. Its largest settlement is the city of Carlisle.
The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region and national park in Cumbria, North West England. It is famous for its landscape, including its lakes, coast, and the Cumbrian mountains, and for its literary associations with Beatrix Potter, John Ruskin, and the Lake Poets.
Ambleside is a town and former civil parish in the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Westmorland and located in the Lake District National Park, the town sits at the head of Windermere, England's largest natural lake. In 2020 it had an estimated population of 2,596.
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet, and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close all their adult lives. Dorothy Wordsworth had no ambitions to be a public author, yet she left behind numerous letters, diary entries, topographical descriptions, poems, and other writings.
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. It is one of his most popular, and was inspired by a forest encounter on 15 April 1802 that included himself, his younger sister Dorothy and a "long belt" of daffodils. Written in 1804, this 24 line lyric was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and revised in 1815.
Grasmere is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Lakes, in the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England, and situated in the centre of the Lake District and named after its adjacent lake. Grasmere lies within the historic county of Westmorland. The Ambleside and Grasmere ward had an estimated population of 4,592 in 2019. William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the 'Lake Poets', lived in Grasmere for 14 years and called it "the loveliest spot that man hath ever found."
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.
The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged, by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.
The Wordsworth Trust is an independent charity in the United Kingdom. It celebrates the life of the poet William Wordsworth, and looks after Dove Cottage in the Lake District village of Grasmere where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth lived between 1799 and 1808. It also looks after the majority of the surrounding properties in the conservation area of Town End, and a collection of manuscripts, books and fine art relating to Wordsworth and other writers and artists of the Romantic period. In 2020 it introduced the brand name Wordsworth Grasmere.
Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District of England. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of "plain living, but high thinking". During this period, William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", "Ode to Duty", "My Heart Leaps Up" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude.
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is a Petrarchan sonnet by William Wordsworth describing London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. It was first published in the collection Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.
Dorothy "Dora" Wordsworth was the daughter of poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his wife Mary Hutchinson. Her infancy inspired William Wordsworth to write "Address to My Infant Daughter" in her honour. As an adult, she was further immortalised by him in the 1828 poem "The Triad", along with Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, daughters of her father's fellow Lake Poets. In 1843, at the age of 39, Dora Wordsworth married Edward Quillinan. While her father initially opposed the marriage, the "temperate but persistent pressure" exerted by Isabella Fenwick, a close family friend, convinced him to relent.
Guide to the Lakes, more fully A Guide through the District of the Lakes, William Wordsworth's travellers' guidebook to England's Lake District, has been studied by scholars both for its relationship to his Romantic poetry and as an early influence on 19th-century geography. Originally written because Wordsworth needed money, the first version was published in 1810 as anonymous text in a collection of engravings. The work is now best known from its expanded and updated 1835 fifth edition.
Moses Bowness (1833–1894) was a Victorian photographer, farmer, entrepreneur and poet.
St Oswald's Church is in the village of Grasmere, in the Lake District, Cumbria, England. It is an active Anglican parish church in the deanery of Windermere, the archdeaconry of Westmorland and Furness, and the diocese of Carlisle. The church is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. As well as its architectural interest, the church is notable for its associations with the poet, William Wordsworth and his family, and for its annual ceremony of rushbearing.
The Lakes Connection 555 is a bus route operated by Stagecoach Cumbria & North Lancashire in Cumbria and Lancashire, England. The scenic route covers a distance of 45 miles (72 km) and runs between the towns of Keswick and Lancaster via Grasmere, Windermere, Kendal and Carnforth.
Allan Bank is a grade II listed two-storey villa standing on high ground slightly to the west of Grasmere village in the heart of the Lake District. It is best known for being from 1808 to 1811 the home of William Wordsworth, but it was also occupied at various times by Dorothy Wordsworth, Dora Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, a co-founder of The National Trust. It is now owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.
The Lakeland Book of the Year, also known as the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year is an award given annually for a book "set in or featuring Cumbria in some way", and is named for the Lake District of north west England. It was founded by writer Hunter Davies in 1984 and is administered by Cumbria Tourism. Davies was one of the judges from 1984 to 2022. In 2023, following Davies's retirement from the role, the judges were Fiona Armstrong, Eric Robson, Michael McGregor, director of Wordsworth Grasmere, and "guest judge" Rachel Laverack from Cumbria County Council. The prizes are traditionally announced at a gala lunch in June, although in 2020 the proceedings took place online because of COVID-19.
Westmorland and Furness is a unitary authority area in Cumbria, England. The economy is mainly focused on tourism around both the Lake District and Cumbria Coast, shipbuilding and the port in Barrow-in-Furness, and agriculture in the rural parts of the area.
during my MA year at Royal Holloway