Gillian Allnutt

Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. Nantucket and the Angel (1997) and Lintel (2001) were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Lode (Bloodaxe Books) is her tenth collection. Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture), working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. In 2025 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Allnutt received The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016. Photo © Phyllis Christopher