Simon Armitage

I am the current national Poet Laureate (2019-2029). I am Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and was elected to serve as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford for 2015-2019. In Spring 2019, I held the post of Holmes Visiting Professor at Princeton University, USA. Previously, I taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and Manchester Metropolitan University before my 2011 appointment as Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield and Visiting Professor at the University of Falmouth. I have received numerous awards for my poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Spoken Word Award (Gold), the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, BBC Radio Best Speech Programme, Television Society Award for Documentary and Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. I won the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and was awarded the 2018 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry. In 1999 I was named the Millennium Poet. In 2004 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I was awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010 and presented with the Hay Medal for Poetry at the 25th Hay Festival in 2012. As part of Britain’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad and while Artist in Residence at London’s Southbank, Armitage conceived and curated Poetry Parnassus, a gathering of world poets and poetry from every Olympic nation. This landmark event is generally recognised to be the biggest coming together of international poets in history. Prior to mainstream publication, Armitage published several limited edition pamphlets with small and local poetry presses, all now highly collectable. These included Human Geography, The Distance Between Stars, The Walking Horses, Around Robinson, and Suitcase. My first full-length collection of poems, Zoom!, was published in 1989 by Bloodaxe Books and further collections are published with Faber.

https://www.simonarmitage.com/biography/

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/557/simon-armitage

Kimberly Campanello

I am Associate Professor of Creative Writing and supervise PhDs in innovative poetry and Creative Writing. My poetry pamphlets and collections include Consent, Imagines and Strange Country (both on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings), Hymn to Kali (my version of the Karpuradi-stotra), and running commentary along the bottom of the tapestry. MOTHERBABYHOME, a collection of 796 conceptual and visual poems on the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway was published by zimZalla Avant Objects in April 2019. In March 2020, I represented the UK in Munich at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a three-day visual poetry festival inspired by the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s organised by the British Council. I was awarded a 2019 Markievicz Award by Ireland's Arts Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. I have also been awarded residencies at the Fundación Valparaíso, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, The Studios of Key West and the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. My poems have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in The London Magazine, 3:AM’s Poem Brut series, Blackbox Manifold, Junction Box, Tentacular, The White Review and Poetry Ireland Review.

http://www.kimberlycampanello.com/

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/2091/dr-kimberly-campanello

John Whale

As Professor of Romantic Poetry, my research has focused on the interface of literary aesthetics and politics in the Romantic period. British responses to the French Revolution have been a central concern and, like many other Romanticists, my work in the late 1980s and early nineties was considerably influenced by the bicentenary of the French Revolution. In my case, this meant reassessing the response of British writers to events across the Channel in France and in particular focusing on the role the creative faculty of the mind - the imagination - could play in political argument. I have also been concerned to widen the scope of critical activity in the period. I was Co-Investigator (with Dr David Higgins as Principal Investigator) of an AHRC-funded Research Network entitled 'Creative Communities, 1750-1830', which involved three workshops and related activities between 2013 and 2014. This developed previous work with colleagues at Leeds on the Creativity Project, which aimed to find ways of moving beyond concepts of genius, inspiration, and originality, and towards thinking about literary creativity in terms of collaboration, connection, and development. I have a long-standing interest in contemporary English poetry. I am a poet and I also co-edit Stand magazine and am Director of the Poetry Centre. My first collection, Waterloo Teeth, was published by Carcanet in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize in 2011; my second, Frieze, was published at the end of September 2013 by Carcanet.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/152/professor-john-whale

Jay Prosser

My position as ‘Reader in Humanities’ allows me to pursue diverse interests in research in writing. I specialise in critical theory and creative nonfiction. I’ve written and edited many books and journal special issues, including on transsexual autobiography, photography, American fiction, and memories of the Ottoman Empire. I teach memoir, particularly family memoir, which I see as a way of telling the untold stories from cultural history. I am currently completing my own family memoir. This is a legacy of loving strangers: of the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora meeting and marrying the Chinese women who worked for them, in Southeast Asia. It’s a story of love and spice (my grandfather’s family were for generations spice traders); of refugees and prejudice. But it’s also an exploration of how empire enables intimacies between far-flung strangers. The book was shortlisted for the 2019 Tony Lothian Prize for the best unpublished biography and won the 2020 Hazel Rowley Prize for best proposal for a first-time biographer.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/1076/dr-jay-prosser

Zaffar Kunial

Zaffar Kunial is an award-winning poet. He has won the Northern Writers Award, the Faber New Poet prize and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poetry. He has been a writer in Residence for the Wordsworth Trust as well as Ilkley and Ledbury Literature Festivals. Faber & Faber have published his debut full poetry collection ‘Us’ which was selected as the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Wild Card Choice’. His poetry has featured in anthologies published by Faber & Faber, Picador, Bloodaxe and The Poetry Society and he has had work commissioned by The Globe Theatre, Manchester Literature Festival and the BBC.

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/zaffar-kunial

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/2457/zaffar-kunial

Caitlin Stobie

I am Lecturer in Creative Writing and Programme Leader for the BA English Literature with Creative Writing. I write poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. My debut poetry collection, Thin Slices, is published by Verve Poetry Press. I am also the author of a monograph, Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction, published by Bloomsbury Academic. My work is informed by the relationship between human and nonhuman bodies, focusing on environmental and medical issues. Much of my writing explores bioethics, particularly reproductive health. I am a member of the editorial team at Stand, Leeds’s international literary journal, and founder of the Leeds Animal Studies Network.

https://www.caitlinstobie.com

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/arts-humanities-cultures/staff/1170/dr-caitlin-stobie

Ross Raisin

I am a lecturer in Creative Writing, who joined the School of English in 2021. Previous to working here at Leeds, I was a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. I graduated (MA) from Goldsmiths in 2004, and from Kings College, University of London (BA) in 2001. I am the author of three novels: A Natural (2017), Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008), and have written short stories for Granta, Prospect, the Sunday Times, Esquire, BBC Radio 3 and 4, among others, and in 2018 published a book for the Read This series, on the practice of fiction writing: Read This if you Want to be a Great Writer.

I also teach for the Guardian Masterclass programme and since 2009 have been a writer-in-residence for the education charity First Story, which places writers in unprivileged schools to deliver creative writing workshops and compile anthologies of the students’ work. My new novel, A Hunger, will be published in August 2022. You can find more on me, my books and teaching on my website.

https://www.rossraisin.com

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/staff/3268/ross-raisin

Sarah K. Perry

S. K. Perry is a fiction writer and poet from Croydon. In 2013 she was long-listed for London's Young Poet Laureate and was Cityread Young Writer in Residence in Soho in 2014. Her short story 'A Wide Neon Yell' won the Berlin Writing Prize, 2019.

https://www.sk-perry.com

Jess Richards

I’m the author of Snake Ropes, which was longlisted for the Green Carnation Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award, 2012 and the Scottish Book Awards. My second novel, Cooking with Bones, was published in 2013. Both novels are published by Sceptre, who have also published my third novel, City of Circles, in August 2017. City of Circles was shortlisted for the Kitschies Awards (novel category) in March 2018.

http://jessrichards.com/