Sinéad Morrissey (Chair)
Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, where she completed her PhD in 2003. Her poem ‘Through the Square Window’ won the National Poetry Competition in 2007. Her six poetry collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) and the Forward Best Collection Prize-winning On Balance (2017), all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and lectured in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She was Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate and is now Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts at Newcastle University.
Daljit Nagra
Daljit Nagra grew up in London and Sheffield, and now lives in Harrow. In 2004 his poem ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ won the Forward Poem Prize, and his first collection of the same name won the 2007 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and won the 2008 South Bank Show/Arts Council Decibel Award. Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (2011) and the Ramayana (2013) were both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His latest collection is British Museum (2017). All his collections have been published by Faber & Faber. He teaches at Brunel University and for two years was Poet in Residence at BBC Radio 4 and at Radio 4 Extra, where he is still curator and presenter of Poetry Extra. http://www.daljitnagra.com/
Photo credit Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Clare Pollard
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe: The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), which she wrote while still at school; Bedtime (2002); Look, Clare! Look! (2005); Changeling (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Incarnation (2017). Clare’s play The Weather (2004, Faber) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. Her version of Ovid’s Heroines (2013) toured as a one-woman show, and she recently co-translated Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf’s The Sea-Migrations (2017, Bloodaxe and the Poetry Translation Centre), which was The Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year. Clare edits poetry for The Idler and is the new editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.
www.clarepollard.com
Photo credit Marcos Avlonitis