Fiona Sampson was first a concert violinist, then studied at the Universities of Oxford, where she won the Newdigate Prize, and Nijmegen, where she received a PhD in the philosophy of language. This research arose from her pioneering residencies in health care. Her most recent poetry collections are Rough Music (Carcanet Press, 2010), shortlisted for the 2010 Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes, Coleshill (Chatto & Windus, 2013), The Catch (Penguin Random House, 2016) and Come Down (Corsair, 2020). She was editor of Poetry Review. from 2005 to 2012, and founded the quarterly review Poem in 2013, which is published by the University of Roehampton where she holds the Chair of Poetry. She gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at Newcastle University in 2010, published by Bloodaxe in 2011 as Music Lessons, following this with Beyond the Lyric: A map of contemporary British poetry (2013), Lyric Cousins (2016), Limestone Country (2017) and In Search of Mary Shelley (2018).
