In Person: 30 Poets

Pamela Robertson-Pearce is an artist and filmmaker. Her films include Imago: Meret Oppenheim (1996), on the artist who made the fur-lined teacup, and Gifted Beauty (2000), about Surrealist women artists including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Imago: Meret Oppenheim won several awards, including the Swiss Film Board's Prize for Outstanding Quality and the Gold Apple Award at the National Educational Film and Video Festival in America. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions in New York and Provincetown (Cape Cod), and in various group shows in the US and Europe. Born in Stockholm, she grew up in Sweden, Spain and England, and then for over 20 years lived mostly in America - also working in Switzerland, Norway and Albania - before moving to Northumberland. She co-edited the anthology Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) with Neil Astley.Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978, and was given a D.Litt by Newcastle University in 1995 for his pioneering work. He has edited nearly a thousand poetry books and published several anthologies, including Poetry with an Edge (1988/1995), Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times (2002/2003 USA), Pleased to See Me: 69 Very Sexy Poems (2002), Do Not Go Gentle: poems for funerals (2003), Being Alive: the sequel to 'Staying Alive' (2004), Passionfood: 100 Love Poems (2005), Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds [with Pamela Robertson-Pearce] (2007) and Earth Shattering: ecopoems (2007), as well as two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor (1988) and Biting My Tongue (1995), and two econovels, The End of My Tether (2002/2003) (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World (2005).