Catulla et al

Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Wales after moving to Cardiff to take a PhD in Critical Theory. After teaching at Aberystwyth University for some years, she is now Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She won the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. She is the editor of a theoretical textbook, The Body: A Reader (2003), and has strong research interests in the medical humanities, especially the history of anatomy and representations of the body. Her fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), includes a sequence exploring representations of pain, illness and recovery – work that won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. She is currently working on a series of critical essays about ‘the poetics of embarrassment’.

'Certainly, like many of her generation, she is commendably various in her concerns, adept at recording the experiences of childhood, family, ageing, love and, of course, the ubiquitous detritus of twenty-first century life. But what sets her apart from the crowd is her unstinting and penetrating gaze, a take-no-prisoners scepticism that somehow never loses its quite particular purpose, and a warm accessibility married with a cool intelligence. Whether writing about difficulties in love or liberty, Tiffany Atkinson is smart, sexy and often very, very funny' - Kathryn Gray, Poetry International Web 'Atkinson's work is cleverly edgy and intimate, balancing the casual and the complex. The closeness and eroticism of love is explored and the quotidian imbued with layers of possible, plausible folklore. Its particular styles derive their effect from seeming familiar but winding round the reader their nagging difference' - Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade 'Atkinson achieves sophistication without brittleness, and illustrates that much of the most intelligent and accessible poetry of the last five years - is being written by young women' - W.N. Herbert, Poetry London