In Their Own Words

In Their Own Words is a celebration of the variousness of contemporary poets living and writing in the UK today. 56 poets talk about their own poetic voices and their work. Essential reading for anybody who cares about poetry.

A backstage peek behind the poetry of some of the best contemporary UK writers. Edited by T.S. Eliot prize winner George Szirtes and Helen Ivory ― two of the UK’s most respected poets and teachers.

In Their Own Words is an examination of the voices writing in the UK today – the book addresses multiculturalism, page and stage, and LBG issues, as well as traditional ‘page’ poetry.

This book is not retrospective, it is a representation of the poetry world as a living, breathing developing thing.

Readers will get an insight into the many ways the poetic voice can develop – it’s a behind the scenes look at the poetics of the poetry.

There is nothing currently available quite like it.

Helen Ivory is a poet and artist. She has a degree from Norwich Art School and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. She has three collections with Bloodaxe Books, the most recent ‘The Breakfast Machine’ was published in 2010. She has taught for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and at UEA where she is Course Director for Creative Writing for Continuing Education. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is an editor for The Poetry Archive.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears’ critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. His recent books include Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004), From a Cliff (Arc, 2002) and of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley). Andy Brown studied Ecology, a discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism, which appears in The Salt Companion to the Works of Lee Harwood (Salt, 2006). He was previously a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation’s creative writing courses, and has been a recording musician.

Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. This is her first book.

Ian Duhig was born into an immigrant family and worked with homeless people for fifteen years throughout England and Ireland before becoming a writer and poet. This is reflected in attitudes to home and landscape in his work, as suggested by the epigraph for his first book from Hugh of St Victor: ‘The man who loves his homeland is a beginner; he to whom every soil is as his own is strong; but he is perfect for whom the entire world is a foreign country.’ Duhig has written five books of poetry, most recently The Speed of Dark (Picador, 2007) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Costa Poetry Prizes. More recently, a short story appeared in The New Uncanny (Comma, 2008) and the cowritten God Comes Home about the legacy of David Oluwale was performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in February 2009.