Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
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.
Roy Fisher was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, whilst remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his long career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, Sean O’Brien, Peter Robinson, Mario Petrucci and Gael Turnbull.
Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".
Jo Shapcott is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Prizes for Poetry and the Cholmondeley Award.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
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.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Roderick Chalmers "Roddy" Lumsden was a Scottish poet, writing mentor and quizzer. He was born in St Andrews and educated at Madras College and the University of Edinburgh. He published seven collections of poetry, a number of pamphlets, and a collection of trivia. He also edited a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade, and The Salt Book of Younger Poets. His collections The Book of Love and So Glad I'm Me were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Ann Sansom is a British poet and writing tutor. She has written two full length collections of poetry and her work has appeared in anthologies, newspapers and magazines around the world. She is currently a regular tutor for the Workers' Educational Association, Poetry Society and Arvon Foundation; and has taught at Sheffield Hallam University, University of Leeds, University of Exeter and University of Oxford. As well as giving hundreds of readings and workshops in the UK over the last two decades, Ann has also read and taught in India, Finland and Greece.
Harry Clifton is an Irish poet.
Jen Hadfield is a British poet and visual artist. She has published four poetry collections. Her first collection, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Hadfield is the youngest female poet to be awarded the TS Eliot Prize, with her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, in 2008. Her fourth collection, The Stone Age, was selected as the Poetry Book Society choice for spring 2021 and won the Highland Book Prize, 2021.
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.
Rita Ann Higgins is an Irish poet and playwright.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Tracey Herd is a Scottish poet based in Dundee.
Darling: New & Selected Poems is a poetry book by Jackie Kay. It was first published by Bloodaxe Books on 27 October 2007. Gap Year, Keeping Orchids, Lucozade, My Grandmother's Houses, Old Tongue, and Whilst Leila Sleeps are all National 5 Scottish texts.
