Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007.
In 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, were gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), which was in turn adapted for performance at COP 26, and for BBC Radio 3. This was followed by Out of Range from Bloodaxe in 2018, which included his poem ‘The Future’, recorded by Andrew Scott, with his fifth Bloodaxe collection, Tipping Points, out in 2027.
He is also a screenwriter, and has written opera librettos and radio plays. He worked as a librettist in a collaboration with the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on Between Worlds, an opera inspired by the events of 9/11 premièred by English National Opera at the Barbican Theatre in 2015, winner of the 2016 British Composers Award for Stage Work. A second music theatre collaboration with Tansy Davies followed, Cave, performed at Printworks London in 2018. He co-wrote the film One Life (2023) about the life of Sir Nicholas Winterton, starring Anthony Hopkins, Johnny Flynn and Helena Bonham-Carter. His lyric ‘The Gathering Tree’, set by composer Rachel Portman, received its world premiere at the Last Night of the Proms. His other projects have included a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos).
His website is www.nickdrakewriter.com
Author photo: Claire Egan
