I was born in 1950. I live in Cardiff, Wales with my husband, son, daughter and two cats, and teach creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. I have published nine collections of poetry and translations, plus a Selected Poems and a sort of mini-Selected, two novels and a critical study of fan fiction (see Books). I translate poems mainly from German but sometimes also from French and Ancient Greek. I read German and Russian at the University of Bristol.
My interests are language, history, northern landscapes from Shetland to the Arctic and all points in between, snooker, mortality, cyberspace (I waste massive amounts of time playing The Sims) and above all, people. I like to use poems to commemorate people and places, sometimes to amuse, to have a go at things I don't like (censorship, intolerance, pomposity) and above all to entertain.
I have been accused of being "populist" and "too accessible", both of which I hope are true.
I have won many prizes and awards, including the Forward Prize for best single poem of 1998, the Bridport Prize, the PHRAS prize, the Cardiff International Poetry Prize (twice) and the British Comparative Literature Association's Translation Prize. My poems have been included in several anthologies, notably Poems on the Underground and The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry. They have also been set to music, have appeared on the trams of Helsinki and the St Petersburg Underground, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.
My blog is here. I don't update it that often, but when I do, it's usually about writing-related stuff.
Events
Tuesday 7th October: reading at Bedwas Writers' Group, Bedwas Workmen's Hall, Old Newport Road Bedwas CF83 8BJ.
Tuesday 14th October: reading in the auditorium, Millennium Centre, Cardiff, as part of the BayLit festival. Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Owen Sheers and John Agard are also scheduled to be there. More details later.
Sunday 26th October : reading at Torbay Festival, 2:30, Grosvenor Hotel, Belgrave Road, Torquay and at the competition prizegiving at 7.30, again in the Grosvenor Hotel.
News
Next collection is finished. It's called Long-Haul Travellers and will feature some poems I wrote in Norway, plus a sequence called "Murat Reis" about people who change their identity. I'm hopnig it will be out in October.
The famous German children's fantasy author Cornelia Funke (sometimes compared to JKR but I prefer to think of her as the German Catherine Fisher) has used a poem of mine, "What If This Road", as an epigraph to the last chapter of Tintentod (Inkdeath), the final volume of her "ink-" trilogy. It's out in English later this year, but the German version is out now and I've got a copy - lovely book, beautifully produced. It uses literary quotes as epigraphs throughout. The translation's fine; I guess the English version will use the original!
My sabbatical is over, but I enjoyed it so much that I've decided to give up teaching in October and concentrate on writing.
Read at Wellington Festival, Shropshire. Nice crowd, who asked interesting questions and bought books, so they are upstanding folk though not quite as upstanding as the noble and erudite citizens of Haverfordwest, who still hold the book-buying record.
In 2006 I gave a paper on slash fiction, The Erotic Space, on Slash Study Day at the Cultural Exchanges conference at De Montfort University and you can read it on the site. I gave another paper, The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady, about slash and women litfic writers, at the 2007 event, and have now put it on the site as well. I also gave a paper at the third and last Slash Study Day this year, but that one won't be put up here.
My current collection is The Movement of Bodies, which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. There's a brief review on their site. The book was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.
My book on fan fiction, The Democratic Genre, came out in 2005. It can be ordered from Seren or on Amazon at this page. Apparently Amazon are being slow so Seren might be a better bet. And there's a new page which gives a little more information about the book and which will keep up with news. And the University of Melbourne's web-based media culture journal, Refractory, published the opening chapter, so you can read it here. There's also a review on The Independent's site.
If you have queries the FAQs don't answer, you might try the guestbook. I answer queries there sometimes and don't always get around to repeating the information on the FAQs pages. Also, entries don't go up in the guestbook as soon as you post them - they have to await my approval, which doesn't usually take long, because I was getting some prat trying to post links to his very, very boring porn site.
