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.
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he is currently both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society (UK) and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has 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.
Philip Gross is a poet, novelist, playwright, children's writer and academic based in England and Wales. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales.
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.
David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist.
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.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
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 three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems.
Gillian Allnutt is an English poet, author of 9 collections and recipient of several prizes including the 2016 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
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.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
Matthew Gerard Sweeney was an Irish poet. His work has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Latvian, Mexican Spanish, Romanian, Slovakian and German.
Robert Ian Duhig is a British poet. In 2014, he was a chair of the final judging panel for the T. S. Eliot Prize awards.
Ken Smith was a British poet.
Susan Wicks is a British poet and novelist.
The Gaze of the Gorgon is a film-poem created in 1992 by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison which examines the politics of conflict in the 20th century using the Gorgon and her petrifying gaze as a metaphor for the actions of the elites during wars and other crises and the muted response and apathy these traumatic events generate among the masses seemingly petrified by modern Gorgons gazing at them from pediments constructed by the elites.
Prometheus is a 1998 film-poem created by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison, starring Walter Sparrow in the role of Prometheus. The film-poem examines the political and social issues connected to the fall of the working class in England, amidst the more general phenomenon of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, using the myth of Prometheus as a metaphor for the struggles of the working class and the devastation brought on by political conflict and unfettered industrialisation. It was broadcast on Channel 4 and was also shown at the Locarno Film Festival. It was used by Harrison to highlight the plight of the workers both in Europe and in Britain. His film-poem begins at a post-industrialist wasteland in Yorkshire brought upon by the politics of confrontation between the miners and the government of Margaret Thatcher. It has been described as "the most important artistic reaction to the fall of the British working class" at the end of the twentieth century.
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is a 1990 play by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison. It is partially based on Ichneutae, a satyr play by the fifth-century BC Athenian dramatist Sophocles, which was found in fragments at the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus.
The Blasphemers' Banquet is a film-poem created in 1989 by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison which examines censorship arising from religious issues. It was created in part as a response to the Salman Rushdie controversy surrounding his publication of The Satanic Verses. It was aired by the BBC 1's programme Byline on 31 July 1989.
