Biography

 

The Year of Two Winters  Indigo Dreams publishing (2023) £9.50 

Offcumdens, Fair Acre Press (2022) £19.99 paperback and £29.99 hardback available from http://www.fairacrepress.co.uk

Heart Murmur, Calder Valley Poetry (2019), £7.00, available from: www.caldervalleypoetry.com

I’ve always written poetry. I enjoyed reading it at school because I had a wonderful English teacher who thought it was more important to listen to the rhythm and music of the words than understanding every image or metaphor in great detail. We listened to recordings of Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas and read TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi while I was still at primary school. I had a privileged upbringing and parents who were both writers so my creativity was encouraged and stimulated from an early age. I was very lucky.

In 2015 I decided to do an MPhil in Writing at the University of South Wales, to learn more about the skills of writing. I chose the course after meeting the poet Philip Gross at the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine symposium in 2013. I admired his work and was delighted to find that he was the convenor for the MPhil. The collection of poems I submitted for the degree was based on my experience of working as a GP and of being a patient myself. In 2018 I did a couple of readings at the Albert Poets in Huddersfield and the Puzzle Poets in Sowerby Bridge. Bob Horne from Calder Valley Poetry was there and very kindly offered to publish me. After several productive meetings with Bob at the cafe at the Piece Hall in Halifax,  my pamphlet ‘Heart Murmur’ appeared in May 2019.

In the last four years my poems have appeared in several poetry magazines and been commended or won prizes in the YorkMix poetry competition, the Ilkley Literature Festival, the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine competition and the Saltaire Festival Poetry competition. 2022 was an exciting year because our book ‘Offcumdens’ was published in March by Fair Acre Press. This was a collaborative effort between Bob Hamilton and myself. He supplied the wonderful black and white photographs of Yorkshire’s landscape, cities and people and I wrote the accompanying poems. We are both ‘offcumdens’ because neither of us was born in Yorkshire. Also in 2022 I was a joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial prize. The result is that Indigo Dreams will be publishing my new collection ‘The Year of Two Winters’ in July 2023.