Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, as a journalist, BBC TV producer, creative writing academic and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels for Penguin Random House as Maggie Brookes. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.
 
Wish – new and selected poems (published Jan 2025) gathers poems from her six previous collections – about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love – alongside bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. As att 17th January, confirmed reading dates: 26 January: Keats House, London; 11 February: Kings Cross, London; 22 February: Faversham, Kent; 4 March: Bedford; 5 March: Enfield; 9 March: Kentish Town, London; 2 May: Langley Marsh, Somerset; 13 May: Greenwich, London; 18 May: Broadstairs, Kent; 24 October: St Albans.
 

This is a poetry of miracles, unfailingly fresh and exuberant, written with clear-eyed, exemplary warmth. Her lines are flooded by intense experiences of a physical world, both lovely and threatened, and of human love whose tenderness is as ‘long-lasting as uranium, thorium, light’.

Alison Brackenbury

A profound act of poetic, elegiac empathy, a love song to us all and to the earth we love, share and ravage. A mature, devastating and ultimately redemptive work, engaging with the best and worst of the human condition in poems both personal and universal. Formally versatile, musical, always precise.

Jacqueline Saphra about everlove(2021)