Dorothy Yamamoto grew up in Barnet, north London, where her Japanese father and English mother settled after the war. That divided background is the source of many of her poems. She’s worked as an English lecturer and teacher, and has written books about cultural perceptions of animals — and, more recently, a detective novel (The Knitting Needle Murder, by Mariko McCarthy).
 
She lives in Oxford, and works as a freelance editor as well as running poetry workshops in such places as museums, galleries, and eco parks. However, she escapes as often as possible from the busy main road where she lives to the wild places of Devon and Cornwall and west Wales. Or simply into her own back garden, which she is also writing about, as a wild world in miniature.
 
Dorothy’s poems have appeared in various magazines, including Acumen, ARTEMISpoetry, The High Window, The Interpreter’s House, Orbis, The Oxford Magazine, The Rialto, Smiths Knoll and South. She has edited a collection of poems by other poets in aid of the charity Freedom from Torture (Hands & Wings, with an introduction by Philip Pullman), and her pamphlet Honshū Bees is published by Templar Poetry.