Carol Rumens (1944-2026)
We were saddened to hear of the death of Carol Rumens. She died from a brain tumour aged 81 on 25 April.
Born Carol-Ann Lumley in 1944 in Forest Hill, South London, she was educated at convent schools before winning a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School. She studied philosophy briefly at London University but left before taking her degree to raise a family in Old Coulsdon in Surrey. She was an editor of the Croydon-based Pick magazine in the mid-1970s and went on to be Poetry Editor of Quarto and of The Literary Review in the early 1980s, and in 1993 founded and co-edited a magazine based in Belfast, Brangle. For nearly 20 years she edited a weekly poem column for The Guardian, from which she published the anthology Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week' (Carcanet Press, 2019).
Carol Rumens published nearly 20 collections of poetry including three retrospective volumes, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, with honours including a Cholmondeley Award, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Prudence Farmer Prize. She led a peripatetic writing, teaching and publishing life with university writing fellowships or professorships taking her to Canterbury, Cork, Newcastle, Durham, Hull, Belfast and latterly Bangor, while also moving from publisher to publisher, with collections from Quarto, Secker & Warburg, Chatto, Bloodaxe, Blackstaff, Seren and Broken Sleep.
Her Bloodaxe titles include four collections and two retrospective volumes, most notably her Poems 1968-2004, as well as Self into Song: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2007). She translated Russian poetry with her late partner Yuri Drobyshev, including the work of Irina Ratushinskaya in Pencil Letter (Bloodaxe Books, 1988) and Evgeny Rein in his Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001). She also edited two seminal anthologies, Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry 1964-1984 (Chatto, 1985), and New Women Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 1990), which introduced the work of poets such as Jackie Kay, Lavinia Greenlaw, Mimi Khalvati, Gwyneth Lewis and Katrina Porteous before they had published debut collections, as well as helping to bring new attention to the work of Elizabeth Bartlett by editing Bartlett's Two Women Dancing: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1995). Her last four collections were Blind Spots (2008), De Chirico’s Threads (2010) and Animal People (2016) from Seren, and Mind's Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).
It was always a delight to work with Carol on her thoughtful and wide-ranging Poem of the Week features for The Guardian, and to pass on to her notes of thanks from poets in response to her close readings of their poems. Her final column featuring a Bloodaxe title ran on 29 December 2025, and in it she discussed a poem from the late Anne Stevenson's Collected Poems - very unusually, this was the second poem featured by Carol from that volume. The December 2025 column can be read here and the earlier column of 24 April 2023 here.
The Guardian has published a tribute to Carol Rumens here.
[06 May 2026]
