Peter Didsbury was born in 1946 in Fleetwood, Lancashire. He moved to Hull at the age of six, and read English and Hebrew at Oxford. After teaching English in Hull for eight years, he turned to the past for employment as well as for inspiration, becoming an archaeologist. His retrospective Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) drew on three previous Bloodaxe collections, The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987) and That Old-Time Religion (1994), plus a new collection, A Natural History. An expanded edition – also drawing upon a later collection, A Fire Shared (2020), along with new and previously uncollected poems – is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026 to mark his 80th birthday. He won a Cholmondeley Award for The Classical Farm, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as was That Old-Time Religion.
