Hollie McNish (born 1983)

Hollie has published the poetry collections Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and a poetic memoir of parenthood, Nobody Told Me, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2016. She co-wrote the play Offside, which relates the two-hundred year history of UK women’s football, and collaborated with the Dutch ensemble, the Metropole Orkest, on her second poetry album Poetry versus Orchestra. Hollie tours the UK extensively, and her poetry videos have attracted millions of views worldwide. She has a keen interest in migration studies, infant health and language learning, and gives performances of her work for organizations as diverse as the Economist, MTV and Unicef.

Cocoon is here.

Sabrina Mahfouz

Sabrina has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King’s Alumni Arts & Culture Award. She has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry, a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights and a Fringe First Award for her play Chef. Her play With a Little Bit of Luck won the 2019 Best Drama Production at the BBC Radio & Music Awards. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa won a 2018 Off West End Award. Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write and Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen. She also contributed an essay to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant.

Boats in a Storm is here.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine is better known as a writer of short stories than as a poet. A passionate and, by all accounts, occasionally difficult character, her love-life was rather complicated: while pregnant with the child of another man, she married her much older music teacher, only to abandon him days later. Rushed away to Germany by her scandalized mother, she suffered a stillbirth. Her relationship with her second husband, John Middleton Murry, was more affectionate by letter than in person. The presence of Ida Baker – the woman she called her ‘wife’ – was presumably a bone of contention. She died of tuberculosis aged only thirty-four.

Spring Wind in London / Strawberries and the Sailing Ship are here and here.

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928)

Charlotte’s middle-class family had little money after her father died, and she and her sister Anne worked to contribute to the household. They had another brother and sister who had been confined to asylums, and Charlotte and Anne vowed never to marry, to avoid passing on mental illness to their children. She wrestled with her faith throughout her life and in her poems, feeling attracted to Roman Catholicism but never actually converting. The deaths of her mother and Anne devastated Charlotte and she sadly took her own life.

Sea Love / Not For That City are here and here.

Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Edna enjoyed great success – particularly during the 1920s – and was the third woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize. Raised, often in poverty, by her mother after she left Edna’s abusive father, Edna proved herself to be intelligent and determined. After a time at college peppered with love affairs with men and women, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York and had what she later called a ‘very, very merry time’. Her direct, feminist poetry was successful and she also wrote lighter, more lucrative, journalism under the name Nancy Boyd. Her later years were marred by illness, but she was still incredibly prolific and produced opera librettos as well as plays, articles and poetry.