The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2016
Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt’s poems as ‘at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron’. Both serious and light in touch, humane and profound, this collection explores the manifestations of the Spirit, tracing it back through the familiar world of Christianity to its roots in the shamanic. This journey goes 'about and roundabout': living in past and present simultaneously; seeking to marry masculine and feminine – in the figure of Mary Magdalene, say, or those of the almost ghostly mother and son in ‘Steppe’ or ‘In Armenia’. The language of these poems inhabits the state, the indwelling, of meditation – that nest of thin air – berthing what, a moment ago, was neither here nor there.
indwelling was Gillian Allnutt's first new collection since Wolf Light (2007), included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems. It was followed by two further collections, wake (2018) and lode (2025).
‘From her first collection published in the early 1980s, Gillian Allnutt’s work has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life. Her writing roams across centuries, very different histories and lives, and draws together, without excuse or explanation, moments which link across country, class, culture and time. The North is a constant touchstone in her work; canny and uncanny, its hills and coast, its ancient histories and its people. Her poems progress over the years to a kind of synthesis of word-play and meditation. In her work the space between what is offered and what is withheld is every bit as important as what is said. She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure. In her outlook, her imagination, her concerns and her lyric voice she is unique.’ – Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate, on behalf of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry Award Committee 2016
‘To read her poems is to be struck by their elemental, worn, limber intelligence, what Adam Thorpe, the poet, playwright and novelist, praises as their sense of ‘half-revealed mystery’. Her startling, beautiful, mythic work was recognised earlier this year with the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.’ – Jonathan Doering, The Friend
'Allnutt’s wonderful poems allow in ever more silence, figured on the page by a double space between lines and the meditative force of her images.' – Adam Thorpe, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year 2013
‘...this collection stands out from anything else I’ve read this year and there are few books I could say that about in any year.’ – Rob Mackenzie, Magma, on indwelling
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. Before that, she read Philosophy and English at Cambridge, and then spent the next 17 years living mostly in London. From 1983 to 1988 she was poetry editor of City Limits magazine. Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. This was followed by three further collections from Bloodaxe: indwelling (2013), wake (2018) and lode (2025). She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988). From 2001 to 2003 she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Newcastle and Leeds Universities. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught creative writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2016. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, and was presented to Gillian Allnutt by HM Queen Elizabeth in February 2017. In 2025 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
