Sasha Dugdale (born 1974)

Sasha is a poet, playwright and translator. From 1995 to 2000, she worked for the British Council in Russia, and she translates Russian poetry and drama. She is the author of poetry collections Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007), Red House (2011) and Joy (2017), and has won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem and the Cholmondeley Award. Sasha edited Modern Poetry in Translation from 2012 to 2017, and is currently poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, and co-director of the Winchester Poetry Festival. * is here.

Sarah Egerton (1668–1723)

As a teenager, Sarah published ‘The Female Advocate’ (1686), a stinging riposte to ‘Love Given O’er’ (1682) by Robert Gould which attacked the ‘pride, lust and inconstancy’ of women. Her horrified father banished her from London for this transgression, packing her off to relatives in the country. She was widowed young, and her second marriage – to a second cousin twenty years her senior, rather than Henry Pierce to whom many of her poems are dedicated – was scandalously stormy. The author Delarivier Manley attacked Sarah’s looks, called her a ‘She-Devil incarnate’ and claimed ‘she’s in love with all the handsome Fellows she sees’ – though it’s worth noting that she was far from unbiased since they had quarrelled viciously. Despite furious legal battles Sarah and her unhappy husband were not granted a divorce. Her work often raged passionately against women being denied freedom and education.

Extract from The Emulation is here.

Safia Elhillo (born 1990)

Safia is the author of The January Children (winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 ‘30 Under 30’. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee and co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her work has been translated into several languages and she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

border/softer is here.

Rebecca Elson (1960–1999)

A distinguished Canadian-American astronomer, Rebecca was one of the world’s leading researchers into star clusters and galaxy formation. She also climbed mountains on three continents, spoke three languages, played the mandolin, cooked wonderfully and was a star striker in her Saturday League football team. Rebecca was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of twenty-nine and died tragically young, aged only thirty-nine.

The Hubble Space Telescope before repair is here.

Laura Fairgrieve

Laura received her MFA from Adelphi University, New York, where she currently teaches writing. She is a recipient of the 2016 Poets & Writers Amy Award. Her work has appeared in publications including Mortar Magazine, East Coast Ink and Underwater New York. She lives in Brooklyn.

Sally Ride Speaks to the Schoolgirls is here.

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965)

Eleanor grew up in London. She was a quiet, bookish child. Although she had little formal education, the household was full of artists and writers and her father encouraged her writing endeavours from earliest childhood. She became best known as a writer of poetry and stories for children, and counted many famous writers, including D. H. Lawrence and Edward Thomas, about whom she wrote a book, among her friends. Eleanor was the author of the hymn ‘Morning has Broken’.