Matt Howard was born in Norfolk in 1978. He is a poet and environmentalist who worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade.
His first pamphlet The Organ Box was published by Eyewear in 2014 and his debut collection Gall was published by The Rialto in 2018. Gall won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize. His second book-length collection, Broadlands, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024.
Matt is also an editor and events programmer. He co-founded The RSPB and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition in 2011 and was co-editor of Magma 72 – The Climate Change Issue.
He has served as a trustee and steering group member of New Networks for Nature, an eco-organisation comprising a broad alliance of creators working to assert the central importance of landscape and nature in our cultural life.
He has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto. He was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023, and is currently manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. He is poet in residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as the recipient of the 2024/2025 YSP/Laureate Fund Residency supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, made possible by YSP Trustee and Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.
His website is: https://linesofmigration.co.uk/
Author photo: Nick Stone
