Caroline Carver was born in England, evacuated by convoy to Bermuda in 1940, and then taken to Jamaica. She returned to school in England as a teenager, before emigrating to Canada for 30 years, and is now back in England, in Cornwall, with her husband, a dog, two cats and four hens.  The  next generation of Carvers live across the water in Falmouth.

Having skirted around the literary life by working in publishing, radio, television and finally pr, as broadcaster, writer, journalist and consultant, Caroline wrote drama, fiction and non-fiction on the side, and only began writing poetry in the 1990s with the Falmouth Poetry Group.

In 1998 she won the National Poetry Prize, and has since won or had poems placed in many other competitions, most recently winning the 2008 Silver Wyvern from Poetry-on-the-Lake, Northern Italy.    She’s published three collections: JIGHARZI AN ME, from Semicolon Press (in West Indian dialect), BONE-FISHING, from Peterloo Poets, and THREE HARES in September 2009, from Oversteps Books.   Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, both here and overseas, and she’s written several commissioned poems.

Caroline’s a Hawthornden Fellow and currently poet-in-residence at Trebah Gardens in Cornwall.  She’s very involved in poetry affairs, through workshops and mentoring activities in particular, and is active in the poetry scene in Cornwall.    A number of her poems have been translated into Italian and Romanian, and BONE-FISHING will be published there in translation.   In 2007, in company with Cornish poets Penelope Shuttle and Victoria Field, she went on a reading tour in Ontario, Canada and  New England/New York (see the story).     She gives a small number of workshops each year and has read throughout the UK, as well as in Italy and North America.

“I had been writing poetry for about two years before the dialect began to come back to me. I hadn’t thought of it since childhood. The first jigharzi poems came like ghosts at midnight. Since then I’m always split in two, writing in first one voice and then another."

e-mail Caroline

  ppf shop on-line...
Poem Card -
"A little Christmas poem"
(& in Christmas set);

shop elsewhere ...
collections -
"Three Hares",
Oversteps Books;

"Bone-Fishing",
Peterloo Poets;

"Jigharzi an Me",
Semicolon;

joint pamphlet -
"October Guests",
fal publications

© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
site feedback welcome