ABOUT SUSAN

Peterloo Poetry Prize winner Susan Utting was selected for the Times newspaper's best love poem prize in February 2010. Her most recent collection, Houses Without Walls, (Two Rivers Press) was featured in the Independent on Sunday and has been widely and warmly reviewed, with a poem from the collection included in the best single poem category of the Forward Book of Poetry 2007.

Her work has won many awards, including a Poetry Business Prize for the collection Something Small is Missing . She has won the Berkshire Poetry Prize, the Hurry Poetry Prize, was a winner in the Academi Cardiff International and has twice been short listed for the Arvon Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop Books.

Susan runs poetry workshops country wide and has taught poetry & creative writing at Reading University for over 16 years. She was appointed Community Laureate for Southern Arts' Year of the Artist 2000/2001 and received the 2005-6 Creative Writing Fellowship from Reading University’s School of English & American Literature.

She is the founder of Reading's acclaimed Poets' Café, a member of Thin Raft Poets and Late Shift Poetry Ensemble. She has read and performed her poetry at arts venues and festivals including Edinburgh, StAnza at St Andrew’s, Ledbury, and for the Poetry Trust at Aldeburgh 2007.

These are intelligent, wittily passionate poems. Susan Utting has an eye for real and telling details.
David Constantine

Poets are often praised for knowing what to leave out. Susan Utting knows what to leave in. Ordinary things gain an almost hallucinatory vividness in her richly textured poems. Utting animates life's brittle edges and her poems carry unforced emotional weight.
Moniza Alvi