Paul Farley, FRSL (born 1965) is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Life and work
Farley was born in Liverpool. He studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art, and has lived in London, Brighton and Cumbria. His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. The book also gained him the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 1999 he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. From 2000-2002 he was the poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere.
His second collection, The Ice Age (2002), received the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004, Paul Farley was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. His third collection, Tramp in Flames, was published in 2006, a poem from which, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem. The same year he also published a study of Terence Davies' film, Distant Voices, Still Lives. In 2007 he edited a selection of John Clare for Faber's Poet to Poet series. He has also written a great deal for radio, and often writes more widely on art and literature.
As a broadcaster he has made many arts, features and documentary programmes for radio and television, as well as original radio dramas, and his poems for radio are collected in Field Recordings:BBC Poems 1998-2000. He makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review, Front Row and BBC Radio 3's The Verb. His book, Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England’s overlooked wilderness (co-authored with Michael Symmons Roberts) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011; it received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award, the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award 2012 and was serialised as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His most recent collection is The Dark Film, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012. In 2009 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.
He currently lives in Lancashire and is Professor of Poetry at Lancaster University.
1996 Observer/Arvon International Poetry Competition
1997 Geoffrey Dearmer Memorial Prize
1998 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
1999 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist)
1999 Somerset Maugham Award
1999 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
2000 Arts Council Writer’s Award
2002 Poetry Book Society Choice
2002 Whitbread Poetry Award
2003 T.S. Eliot Prize (shortlist)
2005 Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem
2007 Griffin International Poetry Prize (shortlist)
2007 T.S. Eliot Prize (shortlist)
2009 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction
2009 E.M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts & Letters)
2009 Travelling Scholarship of the Society of Authors
2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry (shortlist)
2012 Poetry Book Society Choice
2012 Foyles Best Book of Ideas
2012 The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (shortlist)
2012 T S Eliot Prize, shortlist, The Dark Film
The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (London: Picador, 1998) ISBN 978-0-330-35481-3
The Ice Age (London: Picador, 2002) ISBN 978-0-330-48453-4
Distant Voices, Still Lives (London: British Film Institute, 2006) (about the film of the same name by Terence Davies) ISBN 978-1-84457-139-0
Tramp in Flames (London: Picador, 2006) ISBN 978-0-330-44007-3
Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) (London: Donut Press, 2009) ISBN 978-0-9553604-6-6
The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) ISBN 978-0-86547-917-3
Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (with Michael Symmons Roberts) (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011) ISBN 978-0-224-08902-9
The Dark Film (London: Picador, 2012) ISBN 978-1-4472-1255-3
As Editor
John Clare Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2010) ISBN 978-0-571-27427-7
Strange Meetings: Wilfred Owen BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2006
Auden: Six Unexpected Days BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2007
Why Birds Sing BBC4 Television: February 2007
A Poet’s Song BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2008
The Larkin Tapes BBC Radio 4: The Archive Hour, 2008
The Lament of Swordy Well BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2008
Children of the Whitsun Weddings BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2009
A Poet’s Guide to Britain BBC4 Television: May 2009
Rude Britannia BBC4, BBC2 Television: June 2010
The Electric Poly-Olbion BBC Radio 4: Poetry Feature, 2010
Lunch Poems: Frank O’Hara BBC Radio 4: Poetry Feature 2010
Edgelands BBC Radio 4: Book of the Week, 2011
The Sleep Diaries BBC Radio 4: five-part series, 2011
Dee BBC Radio 3: Sunday Feature, 2012
Night Visions BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2012
The Person From Porlock BBC Radio 4: Feature, 2012
Goethe and the West-Eastern Divan BBC Radio 3: Feature, 2015
When Louis Met George BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2003
The English Civil War BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2004
The World in Your Ear BBC Radio 4: The Friday Play, 2006
Hide BBC Radio 4: The Afternoon Play, 2007
Inside the Bonfire BBC Radio 4: From Fact to Fiction, 2010
The Switch-Off Personality BBC Radio 4: Stories (Bath Festival 2011)
