The Best British Poetry 2014 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem.
Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He has published three collections of poetry, Landlocked (1991), Soft Sift (2001), and Six Children (2011). He has also published a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and a selection of his reviews and essays have been published in two volumes, A Driftwood Altar (2005) and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011). He is currently editing an anthology of the poetry of London for Harvard University Press.
Roddy Lumsden (born 1966) is a Scottish poet, who was born in St Andrews. He has published five collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade. He lives in London where he teaches for The Poetry School. He died in January 2020.
Emily Berry’s debut poetry collection Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury, 2013), a compendium of breakfasts. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia.
John Burnside was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Anthony Caleshu is the author of two books of poetry and a novella His poems and stories have appeared widely in journals and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Dublin Review, American Literary Review, and Agni Online. He is the editor of the literary journal Short FICTION and teaches at the University of Plymouth in South West England.
