Gill Horitz lives in Dorset. She has worked in the Arts for many years with different organisations and communities, including programming and running literature projects and writing workshops.
 
In the ’80s, when there were few poetry events in Dorset, she programmed a series of poetry events in Poole, with Michael Horovitz, Frances Horovitz, Roger McGough, Jeff Nuttall, Brian Patten, Ivor Cutler and Phyllis King. She founded and edited a quarterly national magazine to showcase women’s creative work: ‘Women Live – a magazine of writing and artwork by women about their lives’, featuring work by established and new writers and artists.
 
Her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies, (including Writing Women, Mslexia, Smiths Knoll, Frogmore Papers, Tears in the Fence), and a short story in Cheatin’ Heart – Women’s Secret Stories Anthology (Serpents Tale 1998). Her pamphlet, All the different darknesses, was published by Cinnamon Press, in 2019.
 
Her writing has been performed in community projects: as lyrics for Common Ground’s Confluence project, (Otter: Lutra Lutra on the Stour) and for Wimborne Community Theatre, which she co-founded.
 
She was short-listed for the Bridport Prize, 2011. She attends a regular poetry group in Dorset, led by Paul Hyland.
 
Comment on All the different darknesses:
 

Gill Horitz’s poetry is precisely focused and intricately made. It imports large, at times terrifying, landscapes into small, almost claustrophobic, interiors where we may live a while with the poet. It demands to be read carefully, but the rewards of a reader’s care are rich. The poems remember pasts and dream futures – sometimes, vice versa – in which the untouchable is rendered sensuous and the unthinkable is rigorously thought through. Listen to Horitz’s characteristic diction; love her intelligence; appreciate her fine-tuned feminism; admire her passion. Having valued her work for a long time I’m pleased to enjoy the full strength of this gathering.

Paul Hyland