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. His first collection, Far District, came out in 2010 and received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. House of Lords and Commons, his second collection, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award 2016. Other honours include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and the Larry Levis Prize from the Academy of American Poets.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 has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra, on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He has judged many prizes including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize, the David Cohen Prize and the National Poetry Competition. His poems have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, LRB, TLS and New Statesman. He has written for the Guardian and Financial Times. He teaches at Brunel University, London.