Carole Satyamurti (1939-2019) was a poet and sociologist. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves, whether in formal autobiography or in social encounters. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (Karnak, 2003). She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Her Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (W.W. Norton, 2015), was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize.
Her Bloodaxe retrospective, Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), drew on five collections: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990), Striking Distance (1994), Love and Variations (2000), and Stitching the Dark (2005). Two of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. This was followed by two later collections, Countdown (2011), and her final collection, The Hopeful Hat, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, published posthumously in 2023.
