Kit Wright was born in 1944 in Crookham Hill, Kent, and has published over 25 books for adults and children. After a scholarship to Oxford, he worked as a lecturer in Canada, was education officer at the Poetry Society from 1970 to 1975, Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University in 1977-79, and subsequently a freelance writer. His poetry titles include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (Salamander, 1977), Bump-Starting the Hearse (Hutchinson, 1983), Poems 1974-1983 (Hutchinson, 1988), Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, 1989), Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (Leviathan, 2000; Faber, 2008), Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Jug Band Jag (Bloodaxe Books, due 2025). A selection of his poems was included in Penguin Modern Poets 1 (second series, 1995). He has won many literary awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, Hawthornden Prize, Heinemann Award and Cholmondeley Award.
Author photograph: Caroline Forbes
