Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), received a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Her collections include Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2002 and was a Poetry Book Society Choice; Woods etc. (which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize); A Sleepwalk on the Severn (which won the Hawthornden Prize), Weeds and Wildflowers, illustrated by Jessica Greenman (the inaugural winner of the Ted Hughes Award) and Memorial (which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing), a reworking of Homer’s Iliad that has received high critical praise for its innovative approach and stunning imagery, all published by Faber & Faber. Falling Awake (Cape Poetry) was published in 2016 and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for Best Collection and was the winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2016.
Since then, she has published Nobody (Cape Poetry, 2019) and with Paul Keegan co-edited Gigantic Cinema (Cape Poetry and W. W. Norton), an anthology of writing about the weather. In June 2017, she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and from 2019 to 2023 she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Author photo © Kate Mount
