Occupation Poet Nationality British | Name Fiona Sampson Role Poet | |
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Alma mater Royal Academy of Music; University of Oxford, University of Nijmegen Education University of Oxford, Royal Academy of Music Books Beyond the Lyric: A Map of C, Folding the Real, Creative Writing In Health An, The Healing Word, On Listening | ||
Fiona Sampson reads her poem Envoi - The Guardian
Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.
Contents
- Fiona Sampson reads her poem Envoi The Guardian
- Fiona sampson sigtuna litteraturfestival 2015
- Life
- Work
- Awards and honours
- References
Fiona sampson sigtuna litteraturfestival 2015
Life
Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. She has received a number of international writers' fellowships: I.A. Literary Association, Skojcan, Slovenia, 2015, Greek Writers’ Union Writers’ and Translators’ House, Paros, 2011, Estonian Writers’ Union House, Kasmu, 2009, Heinrich Boll House, Achill Island, 2005, Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain, 2002, Hawthornden Castle, 2001, Fondacion da Casa de Mateus, Portugal, 2001. She held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University 2002-5, a CAPITAL Fellowship in Creativity at the University of Warwick 2007-8 and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Institute of Musical Research & Institute of English Studies: 2012-15.
From 2005-12, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). In January 2013 she founded Poem, a quarterly international review, published by the University of Roehampton, where Sampson is Professor of Poetry and the Director of Roehampton Poetry Centre.
She lives in Herefordshire.
Work
Sampson has published twenty-nine books, including collections of poetry, volumes on the philosophy of language and on the writing process. She has written prose on place, literary criticism - she contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the Sunday Times - and biography. She has developed a special interest in the Romantics, editing the Faber Poet to Poet edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley (see below), and being commissioned to write a biography of Mary Shelley "On the White Plain" (Profile, 2018) and a study of the way the Romantics shaped British attitudes to the landscape, "The Everlasting Universe of Things" (Crowood, 2019).
Her work has appeared in more than thirty-five languages and received a number of international awards. Her own translations include the work of Jaan Kaplinski. Sampson's work is held online, in text and audio, at The Poetry Archive.
Her fifth full poetry collection was Rough Music (Carcanet, 2010). It followed A Century of Poetry Review (Carcanet, 2009), a PBS Special Commendation and Poetry Writing: The expert guide (Robert Hale, 2009). Her volume of Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures on the formal links between music and poetry, Music Lessons, was published in 2011, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Faber and Faber Poet to Poet series, appeared in the same year (it was the PBS on-line Book Club Choice), reissued in 2012. Beyond the Lyric: a map of contemporary British poetry (Penguin Random House, 2012) is the first study of the poetry mainstream to identify the range of contemporary British poetics without being partisan, and to recognise the contribution of women across that range; not surprisingly, it was treated as controversial. Coleshill (Penguin Random House, 2013), a PBS Recommendation, is a portrait of place and feeling. Her seventh collection is "The Catch" (Penguin Random House, 2016). In 2016 she also published her study of such musical forms as the phrasal breath in verse, "Lyric Cousins: Musical Form in Poetry" (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). It 2017 she publishes a prose essay, "Limestone Country", with Little Toller.
Sampson has been a judge for the Independent International Foreign Fiction Prize, the Irish Times IMPAC Awards, the 2011 Forward Poetry Prizes and the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 2016 Ondaatje Prize. She chaired the 2015 and 2017 Roehampton Prize and the 2015 and 2016 European Lyric Atlas Prize (in Bosnia). From 2013-6 she was a judge for the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards.
Awards and honours
AWARDS: