Julia Copus
Julia Copus FRSL (born 1969) is a British poet, biographer and children's writer. Biography. Copus was born in London and grew up with three brothers, two of whom went on to become musicians. She attended The Mountbatten School, a comprehensive in Romsey, and Peter Symonds Sixth Form College. She went on to study Latin at St Mary's College, Durham. Copus' books of poetry include "The Shuttered Eye" (Bloodaxe, 1995), which won her an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the pamphlet "Walking in the Shadows" (1994), which won  the Poetry Business competition, "In Defence of Adultery" (Bloodaxe, 2003), "The World's Two Smallest Humans" (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for both the Costa Book Awards (poetry category) and the T.S. Eliot Prize, and "Girlhood" (Faber 2019), winner of the inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. She is known for establishing a new form in English poetry, which she has called the "specular form", in which the second half of the poem mirrors the first, using the same lines but in reverse order and differently punctuated. "Eenie Meenie Macka Racka" (an original 45-minute play for radio) was first broadcast on  BBC Radio 4 in September, 2003, having been commissioned after Copus won the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award for Best New Radio Playwright in 2002. In the same year, she won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition with "Breaking the Rule". Copus was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Exeter in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and the following year was made an RLF Advisory Fellow and awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Exeter. In 2010, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for "An Easy Passage". She has served on  the judging panel for a number of literary prizes, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Costa Book Award, Encore Award and T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry. Copus has also written four picture books: "Hog in the Fog", "The Hog, The Shrew and the Hullabaloo "(Faber 2015), T"he Shrew that Flew" (Faber 2016) and "My Bed is an Air Balloon" (Faber 2018)"." Personal life. She lives in Curry Mallet, with her husband, Andrew Stevenson.