page_title: Fiona Sampson
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Fiona Sampson / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Sign marking Fiona Sampson as poet in residence, Addenbrooke's Hospital
context_page_description: Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE FRSL 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  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, writing a psychological biography  In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.
  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.
  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.
  Sampson has been a judge for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Irish Times IMPAC Awards (now International Dublin Literary Award), 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.
caption: Sign marking Fiona Sampson as poet in residence, Addenbrooke's Hospital
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