Fiona Sampson was first a concert violinist, then studied at the Universities of Oxford, where she won the Newdigate Prize, and Nijmegen, where she received a PhD in the philosophy of language. This research arose from her pioneering residencies in health care. Her most recent poetry collections are Rough Music (Carcanet Press, 2010), shortlisted for the 2010 Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes, Coleshill (Chatto & Windus, 2013), The Catch (Penguin Random House, 2016) and Come Down (Corsair, 2020). She was editor of Poetry Review. from 2005 to 2012, and founded the quarterly review Poem (2013-18), published by the University of Roehampton where she was Professor of Poetry and Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre until its closure in 2022. She gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at Newcastle University in 2010, published by Bloodaxe in 2011 as Music Lessons, following this with Beyond the Lyric: A map of contemporary British poetry (2013), Lyric Cousins (2016), Limestone Country (2017), In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021), and Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic countryside (2022). She received a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2009, and was given an MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Author photo: Kitty Sullivan
