‘I was too ill to write as normal, but the poems kept flowing’: Alwyn Marriage on her long battle with Covid, and the loss of a loved one
Alwyn Marriage is a much-published poet and novelist, and publisher, who last year found herself facing the “jaws of hell”. Her latest poetry collection Pandora’s Pandemic tells how she and her husband succumbed to Covid after attending a literary festival in the early months of the disease, and how her brother died of it. She has since suffered long Covid as well. In an interview with Write Out L...
6th July 2021
'It's been a difficult time for everyone, but we're proud of our track record': Indigo's Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling
Publishers and partners Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams recently notched up two more Saboteur indie awards - for most innovative publisher, and for best collaborative work for their joint poetry collection, Forest moor or less. They run annual pamphlet and full collection competitio...
20th June 2021
‘The astonishing survival of the human spirit’: Jenny Mitchell's poetry on the history of enslavement
Jenny Mitchell’s prizewinning debut collection Her Lost Language was an exploration of the impact of British transatlantic enslavement on black lives and family dynamics. Her new collection Map of a P...
6th May 2021
Sarah Doyle on transforming Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal into poetry
Christmas Day this year will mark the 250th anniversary of Dorothy Wordsworth’s birth. The sister of William Wordsworth is perhaps best known for her journal observations about the daffodils they saw ...
24th April 2021
'A poetic Pepysian diary': veteran performer Nick Toczek has written a daily Covid poem during the pandemic
In mid-March veteran performance poet Nick Toczek started writing a poem a day about the pandemic – and he’s still writing them. He has already published one book of his poetic Pepysian diary of our m...
16th March 2021
Poetry in a family’s time of transition: how it helped Claire Dyer to embrace her child’s gender journey
Claire Dyer is a poet, novelist, and mother. Her new poetry collection Yield is about her child transitioning from son to daughter, and traces the process in which she moved from grief to understandin...
16th March 2021
From Coventry, to Hiroshima, and on to Dresden: Write Out Loud interviews Antony R Owen
Antony Owen is a poet of war and peace, who posted poems on that subject on Write Out Loud more than a decade ago. He has gone on to publish several collections – including one, The Nagasaki Elder, th...
3rd March 2021
The poetry of football (2): website has been 'swapping shirts with Shakespeare' for over 20 years
The Football Poets website was set up in 2000, is still going strong, and now has close to 17,000 poems on its site. Write Out Loud talked to Crispin Thomas, a Forest Green Rovers/Chelsea fan who is p...
10th February 2021
