Author Biographies and Preview of Poems

Renowned for her perfomances on page and stage, Patience Agbabi’s poems have been broadcast on television and radio all over the world. Her work has also appeared on the London Underground and human skin. In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s Next Generation Poets. She has lectured in Creative Writing at several UK universities including Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent. She is currently a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.

She’s published three poetry collections, R.A.W. (Gecko Press, 1995), Transformatrix (Canongate Books, 2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate Books, 2008). This forthcoming collection will be published by Canongate in April 2014.

Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and taught for many years at the University of Hull. She is now a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.Angela Leighton has published books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, including On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, as well as three volumes of poetry: A Cold Spell (2000), Sea Level (2007) and The Messages (2012).  Her poems have appeared in many magazines in Britain and America, and some have been set to music.

Helen Mort (born 1985, Sheffield) is a British poet. She is a five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007, and won the Manchester Poetry Prize Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet-in-residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. In the same year she was shortlisted for the Picador Prize and won the Norwich Café Writers' Poetry Competition with a poem called `Deer`. She was the Derbyshire Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. In 2014, she won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for "Division Street".

She is an alumna of Christ's College, Cambridge, from which she graduated with a Double First in Social and Political Sciences in 2007. In 2014, she completed her Doctorate at Sheffield University with a Ph.D thesis in English/Neuroscience and her BlogSpot `Poetry on the Brain` was one of the Picador `Best Poetry Blogs` choices.Her collection Division Street is published by Chatto & Windus and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In a national survey, it was chosen by sixth-form groups and reading groups as their first choice collection. She has published two pamphlets with Tall Lighthouse press. In 2014 she was named as a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society.

Helen Mort is currently the Douglas Caster Creative Writing Fellow in the School of English at the University of Leeds. She has appeared on radio programmes such as The Verb, Poetry Please, and Woman's Hour. Individual poems have been published in the New Statesman, `Ex-Industrial (a trailer)`, and the Sunday Times, `Admit you feel like all the ice skates in Brazil`, as well as the magazines Poetry Review, Granta, The Rialto, Poetry London, The Manhattan Review, and The North.

I am a practising writer, and have published two collections of poems with Carcanet Press and a pamphlet with EggBox. I am particularly excited by the breadth of poetic practice which exists among UK poets, and in my own writing I try to explore different methods of writing poems.My interests range from the form and structure of poetry, including traditions such as the sonnet or ballad and innovations around mathematical or linguistic approaches to verse form, to poetry based on description or the expression of emotional content.

I collaborate with artists and musicians and am interested in areas of blur between poetry and song, poetry and fiction, and poetry and text art. Performance is an important part of my writing practice and my readings are generally performed from memory, and incorporate music and stand-up comedy. I perform spoken vocals for the contemporary classical ensemble The House of Bedlam, led by the composer Larry Goves.I have been an editor of Stand magazine and a board member of the Manchester Literature Festival, and am interested in exploring the different live and publication contexts of writing.