Julia Deakin is known on the northern poetry circuit as an established poet and as editor of the poetry magazine Pennine Platform. Born in Nuneaton, she worked her way north to Yorkshire via Shropshire, the Potteries, Manchester and France, where her work as an au pair, looking after several children and dogs, prompted a mercifully unpublished novel. Later she taught in secondary and higher education, and after a poetry MA with distinction switched from a successful track record of published prose to writing poems.
 
These range from dark to humorous, in a range of styles, but always with a distinctive voice. She has been placed in many competitions*, featured twice on Poetry Please and, although often quiet in company, is an enthusiastic performer. Venues have included Ilkley Literature Festival; The Jam Factory, Oxford; Saltaire Victoria Theatre with John Hegley; Edinburgh Blackwells; Poets and Players, Manchester; Cork Literary Festival; Huddersfield Literature Fringe; The Troubadour, The National Poetry Library; The Boulevard, Covent Garden; Islington Old Red Lion; Evanston, Chicago and many more.
 
In 2013 she walked the 47-mile Stanza Stones trail with three poets, learning the route and the poems backwards to conduct workshops around Simon Armitage’s engraved poems. In 2014 her poem Codicil was read at Lynda Bellingham’s funeral and published online, without permission, by several daily papers. It appears legitimately in The Half-Mile High Club (2008) available here from The Poetry Business. In 2018 she was the one poet of five writers selected for a Liminal Spaces project, taking an alternative look at Alton Towers.
 
Julia has a BA from the University of York, an MA from Huddersfield, and a Diploma in French Studies from the University of Rennes. She lives near Huddersfield and in free time enjoys walking, sewing, birding and ice skating.
 
*1st prize: Northern Exposure Poetry Competition 2006, Poetry Business Pamphlet 2008, Torriano 2011, Yorkshire Open 2010, Elmet 2011, Bare Hands 2012, Leeds Lippfest 2012, Lightship 2012, Poetry Archive Worldview 2022, 2024.
 
Praise for Julia’s books:
 
Sleepless, 2018, Valley Press
 

Sleepless offers ideas you wish you’d had, poems you wish you’d written. Deakin, humorous and chilling by turns, skewers modern life with a sharp mind, lamenting the route to our demise with a wistful heart. Read it and weep.

 

Dawn Gorman, Writing in Education, 78

 
 

From the first poem’s quiet lyricism, where words spin fourteen lines in a single sentence title-to-close, losing nothing of music, meaning or metaphor, to the wit and word-play of ‘Bradford’, and the final poem’s dazzling thirty sentences about Rothko’s painting, ‘Black on Grey’, these are witty, sometimes experimental, always musical, sharp-eyed, intelligent poems that ring in this reader’s mind.

 

Gillian Clarke

 
 
Eleven Wonders, 2012, Graft
 

Powerful, assured, elegant. Her formal skill and inventiveness make this a rich and eclectic collection. Those who, like me, have admired her individual poems in the past, will be struck by their cumulative strength and range and this book deserves to win her many new readers.

 

Michael Symmons Roberts

 
 
Without a Dog, 2008, Graft
 

Crafted, tender poems, written with passion and purpose. An impressive debut.

 

Simon Armitage

 
 

I read Julia Deakin’s book straight through at a sitting, feeling at home in every one of her poems. She writes from her daily experience delightfully and with a mature wit and wisdom that suggests that, despite her empathy with those who suffer and who have suffered in this flawed, unjust world of ours, she finds life constantly worth celebrating.

 

Anne Stevenson

 
 

Real linguistic inventiveness.

 

Ian McMillan

 
 
The Half-Mile High Club, pamphlet winner 2007, Poetry Business
 

Sharp and knowing, these poems dance before the reader in their exuberance and sudden dark. They are bold, irreverent and wickedly funny.

 

Alison Brackenbury

 
 

Published in anthologies:
The Bridport Prize Anthology, 2011
Acumen First Sixty, 2010
Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, 2013
The Book of Love and Loss, eds. R V Bailey and June Hall, Belgrave Press, 2014
Writing from Chapel FM Series: Missing; Recovery; Threshold, Yaffle Press, 2023, 2024, 2025
Grey Hen Press – several anthologies, see titles & author lists
Live Encounters, May 2018, October 2018
Poethead Index of Women Poets, ‘When I was Six’ and other poems
Southword, 43, 49