Notes on Contributors

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of York and London. Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published as a result of the two poets jointly winning the Poetry Business Prize in 1991. Since then, Moniza Alvi has written eight poetry collections. Moniza’s latest collection is At the Time of Partition (2013) a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the 2013 TS Eliot Prize. Moniza Alvi now tutors for the Poetry School and lives in Norfolk. In 2002 she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry.

Frank Armstrong (@frankarmstrong2) earned a degree in history in University College Dublin before training to be a barrister. He also completed a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures in SOAS, and trained to be a secondary school history teacher. Following accusations of being an eternal student, he began writing articles for the Spectator, The London Magazine, as well as Irish publications including Village Magazine, the Dublin Review of Books and the Irish Times. Latterly, he managed a folk band and ran a Dublin venue that combined music with vegan food. Currently he divides his time between writing and teaching. He is the editor of Cassandra Voices www.cassandravoices.com

Greta Bellamacina is a poet, actress and filmmaker. Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Times, The Evening Standard, Dazed & Confused, I-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, Vogue UK, Elle UK, Wonderland, and Hunger Magazine. She has performed her poetry on CNN, BBC World News, BBC Radio 4 , BBC London, BBC Radio 2 with Jonathan Ross and BBC Radio 3 on The Verb poetry show. After nearly forty years of school-teaching Ian Brinton now writes full time. Recent publications include an edition of Selected Poems and Prose of John Riley (Shearsman), translations from the French of Philippe Jaccottet (Oystercatcher Press), For the Future, a festschrift for J.H. Prynne (Shearsman), An Andrew Crozier Reader (Carcanet) and Contemporary Poetry and Poets since 1990 (C.U.P.). He co-edits Tears in the Fence and SNOW and is on the committee setting up the new archive of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Cambridge. He is the Web Manager for The English Association’s War Poets Website.

Maggie Butt’s fifth poetry collection, Degrees of Twilight, was published by The London Magazine Editions in July 2015. Her previous collections were Lipstick, petite, Ally Pally Prison Camp, Sancti Clandestini – Undercover Saints. Maggie is an ex journalist and BBC TV producer, now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Middlesex University, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Kent. http://www.maggiebutt.co.uk

José Manuel Cardona is a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the author of El Vendimiador (Atzavara, 1953), Poemas a Circe (Adonais, 1959), and El Bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell Insular d’Eivissa, 2007). He was co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications. He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca and belonged to the Cántico group. The Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He holds PhDs in literature and humanities (University of Nancy), and political sciences (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva). He wrote his thesis on the Mexican revolution at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica de Madrid and is an attorney (University of Barcelona). He worked for the United Nations most of his life, in Geneva, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, Kiev, Tbilisi, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Panama, among many places.

Hélène Cardona is the author of seven books, most recently Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves, and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux); and Whitman et la Guerre de Sécession: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb. Publications include Washington Square Review, World Literature Today, Poetry International, The Brooklyn Rail, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, Asymptote, The London Magazine, and The Warwick Review. Acting credits include Chocolat, Jurassic World, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Hundred-Foot Journey, and Serendipity.

Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist, the author of eleven books of prose and poetry. Burnfort Las Vegas was a finalist for the Poetry Now Award in 2015 and her latest book of poems Now We Can Talk Openly About Men is published by Carcanet in May 2018. A regular contributor to The Irish Times, she is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and lives in London with her daughter Liadain.

Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, is published most recently in Salt Hill Journal, Tikkun, The Harvard Review, and Driftwood Press, as well as numerous other venues including two anthologies of women’s fiction. She holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island and teaches composition to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI. She is currently working on a book-length memoir about her years as a kibbutznik in the 1980s.

Philip Richard Hall is a socialist, a teacher and a writer. He is married with three children and lives in New Malden, when he isn’t snorkeling in the Arabian Gulf. Ted Hodgkinson is Senior Programmer, Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre. The 60th anniversary live reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart takes place on Sunday 15 April with readers including Chibundu Onuzo, Lucian Msamati, Olu Jacobs, Adesua Etomi and Kele Okereke, and the live reading of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook takes place on Sunday 22 April with readers including Laura Bates, Eimear McBride, Lara Feigel, Adjoa Andoh and Lydia Wilson. Both in Southbank Centre’s newly reopened Queen Elizabeth Hall. www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Steven Matthews is a poet and critic who was raised in Colchester, Essex, and now lives in Oxford. His poetry collection Skying was published in 2012 and he has been a regular reviewer for journals including the TLS, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. He has been Poetry Editor for Dublin Quarterly Magazine. As a critic, Steven Matthews has published books on a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry in English, including writing on Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Les Murray, and contemporary Irish poetry.

Patricia McCarthy is half Irish and half English. Her collection, Rodin’s Shadow, was published in 2012 by Clutag Press/Agenda Editions. Horses Between Our Legs, headed by her poem which won the National Poetry Competition, 2013, was published in 2014; Letters to Akhmatova came out last year. Rockabye, a new collection was published by Worple Press last year (2017) and Shot Silks by Waterloo Press. She is the editor of Agenda poetry journal www.agendapoetry.co.uk Jeffrey Meyers has recently published Remembering Iris Murdoch in 2013, Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes in 2014, Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016. Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy will be published in 2018.

Konrad Muller served as an Australian diplomat in Cairo and Tel Aviv. He now lives in Hobart and is finishing a novel about the Danish revolutionary and British spy, Jorgen Jorgensen, who ended his days as a convict-commander in Tasmania’s notorious Black War.

Jordan Osborne is a writer and currently studying English & Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth. Jordan is also the founder of award-winning online publication, Vendor.

Michael O’Neill’s fourth book of poems Return of the Gift from Arc appears in 2018. It has received a Special Commendation from the Poetry Book Society.

Tony Roberts’s fourth book of poems, Drawndark, appeared in 2014. He is also the author of an essay collection, The Taste in My Mind (2015), and the editor of Poetry in the Blood (2014), all from Shoestring Press. Concerning Roberts’ poetry, Al Alvarez wrote of ‘an authentic adult voice, tender, ironic, relaxed and highly educated’. Reviewing his prose, John Forth found ‘a detailed map of the age … condensed to appear as table talk’.

Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press. Author of aphorisms, prose poems, short stories, and four volumes of literary criticism, he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for his poetry and translations from the Italian. His most recent publications include a novel, September in the Rain (2016), his Collected Poems 1976-2016 (2017), and a new critical monograph, The Sound Sense of Poetry (2018).

Declan Ryan’s debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator. Shearsman Books have recently reissued his poetry collections in new editions and published his third The Sleepwalkers in March 2016. His translations with Arc, Menard and Hesperus include works by Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Trakl, Rilke, Nerval and Roth. Pushkin Press published his Stefan Zweig Montaigne in August 2015 and Zweig’s 1930’s essays as Messages from a Lost World in January 2016. His Selected Poems of Georges Rodenbach will be published by Arc in 2017 and an expanded collection of the poetry of Georg Trakl by Seagull Books in 2017. Will also contributes to Poetry Review, The TLS and Apollo magazine.

Iain Twiddy grew up at the edge of the fens in Lincolnshire, eastern England. He is the author of two critical studies of contemporary poetry. He lives in the city of Sapporo, in northern Japan.

Stuart Walton is a cultural historian and critic. He is author of Intoxicology: A Cultural History of Drink and Drugs, as well as A Natural History of Human Emotions, In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, Introducing Theodor Adorno and a novel, The First Day in Paradise. He has also written widely on food and wine, and lives on what is known unironically as the English Riviera.

For over a quarter of a century Linda Wilkinson was in biomedical science finally working as a Research Fellow at UCL’s arthritis research facility where she was part of the team to differentiate the cells which line the human joint. She has been writing professionally since 1996 producing award winning plays, history books and novels. Her memoir, Columbia Road of Blood and Belonging was published last year.

Robert Wilton was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the period before the country’s independence, and has lived and worked in the Balkans for most of the last dozen years. He also writes on the history and culture of the region, and translates Albanian poetry. He’s co-founder of The Ideas Partnership charity, working with marginalized Balkan communities. Treason’s Spring, latest in his prize-winning series of historical novels, was published in Autumn 2017.

Kieron Winn’s first collection of poetry, The Mortal Man, was published in 2015 by Howtown Press: ‘superb collection’ ( Agenda); ‘the unmistakable ring of the real thing’ (Bernard O’Donoghue). He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot. His poems have appeared in magazines including Agenda, Agni, The Dark Horse, Literary Imagination, The London Magazine, The New Criterion, New Statesman, Oxford Magazine, Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement; poems have also been broadcast on BBC TV and radio. He lives in Oxford, where he teaches literature and creative writing.