Ruth Fainlight Profile in the Financial Times
Portrait of Ruth Fainlight at her kitchen table by Emily Andersen
Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966, and her retrospective, New & Collected Poems, in 2010. This was followed in 2018 by a new collection of poems written in her 80s, Somewhere Else Entirely.
PROFILE OF RUTH FAINLIGHT IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Financial Times, published online 15 March 2025, due in print Saturday 22 March 2025
A major feature on poet Ruth Fainlight went online in the Financial Times on 15 March 2025. It ran with the standfirst ‘The American poet, now 93, has carved out a place as one of her generation’s most admired writers’. The feature was illustrated with photographs of Ruth Fainlight taken especially for the piece by Sandra Mickiewicz, and with archive photos of Ruth and her husband, and of Sylvia Plath, whom Ruth knew.
Ruth Fainlight was speaking to Helen Bain, who has a novel forthcoming in 2026 about Sylvia Plath. Their wide-ranging conversation covered Ruth Fainlight’s life and poetry, and her long marriage to the late writer Alan Sillitoe. Alice Quinn, poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007, was interviewed for the piece. She had published some of Ruth Fainlight's ‘exquisitely beautiful, lyrical poems’.
Photographer and filmmaker Emily Andersen was also interviewed. Her hour-long film portrait of Ruth Fainlight, Somewhere Else Entirely, which takes its name from Ruth's 2018 poetry collection, was shown in a gallery in Nottingham from March to May 2023, and will be released later his year.
'Her life and her writing are completely intertwined. She knew I understood how difficult it had been for her to make it as a poet. She managed it through sheer will and determination, as well as talent.' – Emily Andersen
The covers of Ruth Fainlight’s two available Bloodaxe titles, New & Collected Poems and Somewhere Else Entirely are illustrated in colour within the piece.
Available to view without subscription. The print edition is due to appear in print in FT Weekend on Saturday 22 March 2025.
https://www.ft.com/content/92864b81-8eea-4343-b866-f71950701e23
FILM PORTRAIT OF RUTH FAINLIGHT
Emily Andersen: Somewhere Else Entirely
A multi-channel film installation from internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen exploring the work and life of Ruth Fainlight – an American-born poet and writer – was shown as part of an installation at the Bonnington Gallery in Nottingham from 25 March to 13 May 2023. Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction touch on themes of psychological and domestic situations, time, memory and loss. This immersive installation features projections representing different fragments of her work, which visitors are invited to explore and reflect upon.
Combining installation, educational workshops and performative readings,the exhibition Somewhere Else Entirely uses the work and life of Ruth Fainlight to reflect on the reciprocity of words and images, and processes of biography. The presentation of this film at Bonington Gallery at Nottingham Trent University is significant, as Ruth Fainlight was married to the late Alan Sillitoe, the eminent Nottingham author.
The cover picture of Ruth Fainlight's 2018 poetry collection Somewhere Else Entirely is a photograph by Emily Andersen. The photograph of Ruth at the top of this page is also by Emily Anderson.
Film interview with photographer Emily Andersen and clips from her film portrait of Ruth Fainlight
Andersen’s work is an intimate portrait of Fainlight, now aged 91, presenting fragments of the poet’s life. Taking inspiration from Renaissance triptychs and their depiction of different elements of the same subject across three panels, Somewhere Else Entirely captures the poet and writer at her home in London, making notes, on her walks, and in the seaside town of Brighton where she spent her teenage years.
In Somewhere Else Entirely Fainlight talks off-screen, revealing fascinating insights into her life, her creative process, and how she is ‘in the hands of the poem’. In her voiceover, she movingly recites her poem ‘Somewhere Else Entirely’ composed after the death of her husband, the title poem from her most recent collection.
This film by Reece Straw about Somewhere Else Entirely is available to watch on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZf8v702tPg
Still available:
BBC RADIO 4 INTERVIEW WITH RUTH FAINLIGHT
Front Row, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 20 November 2018, 7.15pm
Ruth Fainlight was Front Row’s studio guest on 20 November 2018. She spoke to John Wilson about her just-published poetry collection Somewhere Else Entirely.
Ruth read her poem ‘The Motorway’, and they discussed her poems ‘Oxygen Mask’ and then ‘World Events’. In the latter she writes about the trip to Devon that she had planned to make with her friend Sylvia Plath, and which never took place - the year being written about was 1963.
‘Poet Ruth Fainlight talks about her new collection Somewhere Else Entirely, her first book in eight years and the first since the death of Alan Sillitoe, her husband of 50 years. Several of the works in Fainlight’s collection serve as elegies to him, a meditation on mortality and memory in poetry and prose.’
Click here to listen. Intro & final item, from 19:00.
REVIEW COVERAGE
‘Ruth Fainlight is an American-born poet, now eighty-eight, who moved to England at the age of sixteen… She published a New and Collected Poems in 2010, and the motherhood poems of her first collection Cages (1966), as well as the elegy for Plath, “Autumn Stirring”, provide a useful context for the humility, the acquired wisdom and uncertainty we find in her latest book, Somewhere Else Entirely, which is a welcome addition to her considerable achievement.’ – Kathryn Maris, The Times Literary Supplement
'Her New & Collected Poems, representing half a century's work, asks us to read her writing life as a journey that never really ends, even with publication of a monumental achievement...an extraordinary maturity of voice and vision. The essential continuity of her work is immediately striking; the poems affirm her own sense of poetry (and life) as a constant happening, the past a perpetual present.' – Fran Brearton, The Guardian
[08 December 2022]
