Meeting update
Fiona Sampson Tuesday 29th November 7.30pm at The village Cafe
Fiona Sampson gave the poetry reading on Tuesday 29th November instead of Annie Fisher who was unfortunately unable to come due to health problems. We hope Annie and Anthony will be able to come on another occasion.
We were privileged to welcome Fiona Sampson to East Coker and fortunate that she stepped in at such short notice enabling the meeting to go ahead.
Professor Fiona Sampson MBE, FRSL has published twenty-nine books, including seven collections of poetry. Her latest collection, Come Down (2020), received the Wales Poetry Book of the Year; in the same year she was awarded the European Lyric Atlas Prize and the Balkan Naim Frasheri Laureateship for her body of work. She has been published in thirty-seven languages, and received numerous other national and international honours, including the Newdigate and Cholmondeley prizes, multiple awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, the Society of Authors, the Poetry Books Society and Arts and Humanities Research Council, numerous Book of the Year selections and several short-listings for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes – plus further international prizes in the US, Bosnia, Northern Macedonia and India.
Her studies of writing process include Beyond the Lyric and Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form. She edited Percy Bysshe Shelley (Faber) and her Limestone Country was a Guardian nature writing book of the year. A critic, librettist and literary translator, from 2005-12 she edited Poetry Review, and she’s served internationally on the boards of publishing houses and literary NGOs, on literary juries and on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature. She’s a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton.
Her internationally acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley is followed by Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Washington Post Book of the Year, a finalist for the international Plutarch Prize and for US PEN’s international biography award, and currently a Times/Sunday Times paperback of the year. She is at work on a biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Princeton University Press.