John Powell Ward was born in Suffolk in 1937 and educated at Toronto and Cambridge universities. He taught at the University of Wales, Swansea, where he is now an Honorary Research Fellow. As well as critical books on Wordsworth, Hardy and R S Thomas, he has written three studies of poetry in relation to sociology, Englishness, and the alphabet. He edited
Poetry Wales from 1975–80 and has published seven collections, including
Selected and New Poems (Seren 2004).
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Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942 and studied at Stanford and Columbia Universities. She lives in New York City where she was State Poet Laureate 1998–2000. She teaches at the University and at Goldwater Hospital where she runs a workshop she founded for the severely disabled. Her numerous honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. With work from seven collections, her
Selected Poems (Cape) was published in the UK last year.
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Alistair Reid was born in Whithorn in 1926 and grew up in Scotland. After war service in the navy, he finished his studies at St Andrews University and has subsequently spent much of his life in the Americas, North and South. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has published more than forty books – poems, prose and translations of work by many Latin American writers, Borges and Neruda in particular. A pamphlet of his poems will be published to coincide with the Festival.
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Jane Routh lives in North Lancashire where she manages woodlands and a flock of geese. In a previous life she taught photography and art history in the Visual Arts Department at Lancaster University. Her
Circumnavigation won the Poetry Business Competition in 2001 and her second collection
Teach Yourself Mapmaking (Smith/Doorstop 2006) is a Poetry Book Society recommendation.
Jon Stallworthy was born in 1935 and educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Oxford. Having been Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Cornell, he is now a Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. His books include critical studies of Yeats, biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice, autobiography, editions of Owen’s and Henry Reed’s poems, translations and various anthologies. He has published ten collections, most recently
Body Language (Carcanet 2004).
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Joy of Six is a group of five prizewinning poets – Anne Berkeley, Martin Figura, Peter Howard, André Mangeot and Andrea Porter – who have been performing together since 2000. Their unusual integrated sets blend their very different voices and styles into a seamless unpredictable whole. Their poems are widely published in the best magazines and anthologies and they have seven collections between them.
Joy of Six website
Tim Turnbull was born in North Yorkshire in 1960 and now lives in Scotland. After leaving school he worked in forestry and played and sang in various bands for fifteen years, before going on to study Creative Writing at Middlesex and Sheffield Hallam Universities. He has published three collections – most recently
Stranded in Sub- Atomica (Donut 2005) – and won many slam competitions, in 2006 receiving the Arts Foundation's Performance Poetry Award. He is this year’s Festival Writer-in-Residence.
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Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up there, in Jerusalem and in Texas, where she studied at Trinity University and still lives with her husband and son. A translator, editor and author of children’s books and young adult fiction, she has been both a Library of Congress and a Guggenheim Fellow and published seven collections, most recently
You and Yours (BOA Editions 2005).
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