Suzanne Batty was born in Devon and moved to the suburbs of Manchester as a small child. She left home to work with young homeless people in London and lived for a time at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp before moving to Brighton to study English Literature.
She started writing poetry seriously after moving back to Manchester in 1993 whilst making a living through jobs in anti-poverty work and welfare rights advice. When her debut pamphlet, Shrink, was a winner in The Poetry Business pamphlet competition 1998 she began working full-time as a freelance writer, editor and tutor. From 2007 to 2016 she was a lecturer/senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.
An Arts Council grant in 1999 enabled her to begin work on The Barking Thing, her first collection with Bloodaxe, published in 2007. In 2013 she won the Poetry Society’s Anne Born Prize. Her second collection, States of Happiness, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. She received a Northern Writers' Award for Poetry in 2022.
Collaborations with musicians, visual artists, photographers and ceramicists have inspired original work for both exhibition and performance. She is committed to sharing her creative practice as a means of supporting people who also experience periods of mental distress.
A lifelong passion for drama and performance informs her latest collection with Bloodaxe, Do Not Feed the Ghosts (2027). She is currently working on a hybrid poetry/drama project, Syd, which was longlisted for Women in Theatre Lab 2024.
Author photo: Cathy Fortune
