Next term’s guest poet will be Jo Shapcott. She is the first person to win the National Poetry Competition twice, the second time in 1991 for the acclaimed poem, “Phrase Book”. Her first collection, Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe 1988), won a Commonwealth prize. Her second, Phrase Book (OUP 1992), was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is co-editor with Matthew Sweeney of Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times, published by Faber last year.
Jo Shapcott’s poems for children, The Creatures Indoors, were arranged by composer Stephen Montague and premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. She is the 1997 Penguin Writers Fellow at the British Library and the Poetry Society’s resident poet on the Internet.
