Royal Academy of Music; University of Oxford, University of Nijmegen
Period
contemporary
Fiona Ruth Sampson (born 1963) MBEFRSL[1] is a British poet, writer, editor, translator and academic who was the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark. She received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Sampson has been publishing poetry since 1996 and some of her earlier work is held at The Poetry Archive.[3] Her work has been translated into several languages and her own translations include the work of Jaan Kaplinski and Amir Or. Her themes are faith and landscape.[4][5] Her first full collection, Folding the Real was published in 2001 and followed by The Distance Between Us (2005), a novel in verse. Her poem Trumpeldor Beach was shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize. Her later poetry collections include Common Prayer (2007); shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Rough Music (2010)[4] shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Forward Poetry Prize, and Coleshill (2013).[6] Her eighth collection, Come Down (2019) was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year (Poetry).[7]
From 2005 to 2012, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK.[8] She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). During this time she published a critical anthology A Century of Poetry Review (Carcanet, 2009), a writing manual Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide (2009), a volume of lectures, Music Lessons, and Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry (Penguin Random House, 2012), a study of the poetry mainstream in the late 20th Century.[9]
In 2013 Sampson became Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and the Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre.[5] She created the Roehampton Prize for Poetry[10] and chaired the judges in 2015 and 2017. Here she founded[5]Poem,[11] a quarterly international review. 19 issues were published between 2013-2018. The centre along with Roehampton's Creative Writing program was closed in 2022.[12]
Literary Criticism and Biography
Sampson is interested in the Romantics. Her Faber Poet to Poet edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published in 2012. Starlight Wood: Walking Back to the Romantic Countryside,[13] a collection of 'Romantic' walks was published by Corsair in 2022. In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein.[14][15] was a finalist for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed prize.[16] This was followed by Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021) [17] which was longlisted for the Biographers International Organisation Plutarch Prize 2021,[18]
Sampson is a former musician and has worked with composers, including commissions with Sally Beamish,[20]Stephen Goss[21] and Philip Grange. In 2016 she published a study of musical forms and poetry, Lyric Cousins: Music l Form in Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).[22]
Sampson has published scholarly works and works for general readers on the subject of writing and health care (below).
