The Forward Book of Poetry 2018

Emily Berry's first book of poems is Dear Boy, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible and editor of Best British Poetry 2015. A selection of her work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 1: If I'm Scared We Can't Win. She is editor of The Poetry Review. Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published eleven collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, The Weather in Japan (2000) which won both the Hawthornden Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Stairwell (2014) which won the Griffin International Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was appointed a CBE in 2010, and from 2007 to 2010 was Ireland Professor of Poetry. In 2015 he was elected a Freeman of the City of Belfast. His most recent collection, Angel Hill, appeared in 2017, as did Sidelines: Selected Prose 1962-2015. He was awarded the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize. Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among other honours. Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, his collections of poetry include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate. Daljit Nagra was born into a working class, Sikh family in London. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, on the Council of the Society of Authors, Advisor to Poetry By Heart, and presents the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra. Nagra's collections have won the Foward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Book, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. He lives with his family in Harrow.