Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery

Linda Anderson is Professor of Modern English and American Studies at Newcastle University, and founder of Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Newcastle Poetry Festival. Her publications include Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Edward Arnold, 1990), Remembered Futures: Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (Prentice Hall, 1997), The New Critical Idiom: Autobiography (Routledge, 2001), Autobiography (Routledge, 2010), and Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and she is co-editor with Mark Byers and Ahren Warner of The Contemporary Poetry Archive (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); with Jo Shapcott of Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe Books/Newcastle University, 2002); and with David Alderson of Territories of Desire: Contemporary Queer Culture (Manchester University Press, 2000). Her pamphlet, Greenhouse, was published by Mariscat Press in 2013, and her first book-length collection, The Station Before, was published by Liverpool University Press (Pavilion Poetry) in 2020.Jo Shapcott is one of Britain’s leading poets. She has twice won the National Poetry Competition, and won the Forward Prize in 1999. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1998-2000, and is Visiting Professor of Poetry at Newcastle University and at the University of the Arts, London; she also teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College. Her poetry books include Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), Phrase Book (OUP, 1992), My Life Asleep (OUP, 1998), Her Book (Faber, 1999), Tender Taxes, including her versions from Rilke’s French poems (Faber, 2001), and Of Mutability (2010), winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award. She co-edited the anthology Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (Faber, 1996) with Matthew Sweeney, and Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe / Newcastle University, 2002) with Linda Anderson. She gave the first of the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, The Transformers, in 2001. She received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2011.