RACHAEL ALLEN
Rachael Allen is the author of God Complex and Kingdomland, both published by Faber. She works as an editor and lecturer in London.
SIMON ARMITAGE
Simon Armitage is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His numerous accolades include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and an Ivor Novello Award. His latest collection Blossomise was a Sunday Times bestseller. Armitage writes, records and performs with the band LYR. Never Good with Horses features his song lyrics. He also writes extensively for theatre, television and radio. He was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015-2019). Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.
NICK BARLEY
Nick Barley has recently been appointed as Director of the forthcoming National Poetry Centre in Leeds. He is also a Professor in Practice at Durham University. Nick was Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival from 2009 until 2023. He chaired the judges for the 2017 International Booker Prize.
KHAIRANI BAROKKA
Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, and translator from Jakarta, and former Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Among her honours, she was an Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis and environmental justice. Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches).
FIONA BECKET
Fiona Becket is Professor of Contemporary Poetics at the University of Leeds. With Terry Gifford she co-edited Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism (2007), and has published on eco-poetics with respect to modernists James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and visual poetics with respect to a range of twentieth-century and contemporary poets. Her latest book, Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman will be published by Routledge in February 2025.
NAT BELLINGHAM
Nat Bellingham is a freelance maker, performer, and creative facilitator. Born in South Africa, raised in Manchester, and now living in Wakefield, Nat works with adults, children, families and young people in visual arts. Nat continues to instigate projects, collaborate, mentor, and teach, alongside her practice. She has worked with YSP as an artist educator for over 12 years.
CAROLINE BIRD
Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. Her latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, was published in July 2024.
SEAN BORODALE
Sean Borodale has four collections of poetry published by Jonathan Cape, his debut Bee Journal was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and Costa Book Awards. He was a Granta New Poet in 2012 and is a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet. He has been Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and Oscar Wilde Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
NIALL CAMPBELL
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His new collection, The Island in the Sound, is published this year. He is editor of Poetry London.
ANTHONY VAHNI CAPILDEO
Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, their interests include silence, plurilingualism, place, memory, faith, and traditional masquerade. Capildeo’s ninth full-length book, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024), had its in-person launch at the ALT book fringe in Edinburgh, in solidarity with calls for book workers to organize for a genocide-free, fossil fuel-free book industry.
J.R. CARPENTER
J.R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, mudlarker, fossil hunter, and lecturer in Performance Writing in the School of English at University of Leeds. Her most recent poetry collection, The Pleasure of the Coast, was published by Pamenar Press in 2023. Her next collection, Measures of Weather, will be published by Shearsman Books in 2025.
KAYO CHINGONYI
Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia, and moved to the UK at the age of six. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda (2015), won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kayo is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. His most recent collection, A Blood Condition (2021), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the TS Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award.
JEREMY DAVIES
Jeremy Davies is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Leeds. He writes about British Romantic literature and environmental topics. His most recent book is The Birth of the Anthropocene (2016, University of California Press).
ELLA DUFFY
Ella is the author of New Hunger (The Poetry Business, 2020), Rootstalk (Hazel Press, 2020), and Greencombe (Hazel Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto, Ambit and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She is the editor of botanical poetry anthology, Seeds & Roots (Hazel Press, 2022), and has been a guest editor for Butcher’s Dog and Magma.
ANTONY DUNN
Antony Dunn is a regular tutor for the Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation. He has published four collections of poetry, most recently Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). He has been Poet in Residence at the Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and, currently, the People Powered Press.
MATTHEW HOLLIS
Matthew Hollis is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Biography Award, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022), a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Ground Water, a poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, 2004; Earth House was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry, 2023.
MATT HOWARD
Matt Howard is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His first collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. After eleven years working for the RSPB, Matt was Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 2021-2023. His second collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe.
SARA HUDSTON
Sara Hudston runs Hazel Press, an independent publisher committed to producing short books using eco-aware methods and materials. Sara is a writer, activist, and longstanding Guardian Country Diarist. Hazel Press, founded in 2020 by Daphne Astor, is named after the hazel tree, with its strongly rooted magical symbolism, poetic allusions, and practical uses; it publishes poetry, essays, and occasional short fiction.
ZAFFAR KUNIAL
Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He is a recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize and his first poetry collection, Us, published by Faber & Faber in 2018 appeared on a number of shortlists including the Costa Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His second collection, England’s Green, was The Times Poetry Book of the Year and was placed 2nd in the Laurel Prize.
KAREN MCCARTHY-WOOLF
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of two poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies including Mapping the Future, which was nominated for a Sky Arts Award. A postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at the UCLA, she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, her debut An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year. Her latest, Seasonal Disturbances, was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry.
HELEN MORT
Helen Mort FRSL is an author from Sheffield, and Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her collections Division Street, No Map Could Show Them, and The Illustrated Woman are published by Chatto & Windus. Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She has also published a novel, Black Car Burning (2019), and her memoir A Line Above The Sky (Ebury, 2022), examines the relationship between mountains and motherhood. Her biography of environmental campaigner Ethel Haythornthwaite was published in 2024.
CALEB PARKIN
Caleb Parkin, Bristol City Poet 2020-22, has poems in The Guardian, The Rialto, numerous other journals, and was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. His debut, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. Mingle, his second collection, is out in October 2024. He tutors widely, holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and is a PhD researcher at University of Exeter with RENEW Biodiversity.
ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon Books and YesYes Books). Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge.
YVONNE REDDICK
Yvonne Reddick is a poet, nature writer and environmental filmmaker. She is the author of Burning Season (Bloodaxe), winner of the Laurel Prize for Best First UK Collection of Ecopoetry, and the scholarly books Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Anthropocene Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan.) She made the film Searching for Snow Hares, with filmmaker Aleks Domanski. She is currently working on a film about bees, pollinators, and the wonderful world of tiny creatures.
VERA TRAPPMANN
Vera Trappmann is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations, University of Leeds, and a member of the Executive Board of
Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. Her research focuses on Sustainability at Leeds University Business School. In this role, she was dedicated to increase student engagement with climate action.
EMMA TROTT
Emma Trott is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds, where her research crosses over between the environmental humanities and medical humanities, with particular interests in literary representations of plants and animals, creative encounters with the heart, and language in medicine. Her study of contemporary British ecopoetics is forthcoming next year from Routledge.
JOHN WEDGWOOD CLARKE
John Wedgwood Clarke is Professor in Poetry at the University of Exeter. He has published three collections of poems, Ghost Pot (2013), Landfill (2017), and Boy Thing (2023). He regularly leads and collaborates on interdisciplinary projects funded by AHRC, NERC, ACE, Leverhulme, Natural England, and others. His latest work focuses on the cultural significance of bogs and their ecological complexity.
JOHN WHALE
John Whale is Director of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His two collections of poetry are Waterloo Teeth (2010) and Frieze (2015). The former was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Award in 2010. He is managing editor of Stand magazine.