Penelope Shuttle was born in Staines in 1947 and has lived in Falmouth, Cornwall since 1970. She was married to the poet Peter Redgrove who died in 2003, after several years of ill-health. Redgrove was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996.
 
Penelope has a grown-up daughter Zoe Redgrove, who is an environmentalist working in Bristol at The Centre for Sustainable Energy.
 
Since Shuttle’s first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs, appeared from Oxford University Press in 1981, she has published a further seven collections plus a Selected Poems. Her eighth collection, Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe Books), 2006, was short-listed for The Forward Prize and for The T S Eliot Award.
 
Her ninth collection, Sandgrain and Hourglass, is published in October 2010, (Bloodaxe Books). Three of her collections have been Recommendations of the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 the PBS re-published her 1988 collection, Adventures with My Horse, as part of a re-launch of eight collections by poets who received either the Choice or a Recommendation in former years.
 
Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including The Firebox (ed Sean O’Brien, Picador, 1998), The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (ed Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford), Sixty Women Poets (ed Linda France, Bloodaxe, 1993), Modern Women Poets, (ed Deryn Rees-Jones), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry (ed Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison), and Images of Women (ed Myra Schneider and Dilys Wood, Arrowhead Press in association with Second Light Network, 2007).
 
She is widely published in many magazines including The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, Stand, ARTEMISpoetry, The Manhattan Review, P N Review, The Wolf and The Times Literary Supplement, etc.
 
With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound (1978, 1986, 1994 and 1999). The Wise Wound has appeared in America and been translated into German, Dutch and Croat. Shuttle has featured in a number of television documentaries on the themes of The Wise Wound, most recently in Moon Inside You, for Spanish TV.
 
A selection of her work can be heard online at Poetry Archive, and a cd can be purchased from this site or online from the Poetry Book Society.
 
She has received a Radio Times Drama Bursary Prize, the Greenwood Poetry Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, three Arts Council Awards, an Authors’ Foundation Grant and, on behalf of her late husband and herself would like to thank The Royal Literary Fund for their financial support.
 
In 2007 she received a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors.
 
Her poetry has also been recorded for The Harvard Poetry Room and broadcast frequently on BBC Radios 3 and 4. Her poem Outgrown was featured in a radio and television commercial.
 
She has been a judge for many poetry competitions, including the Arvon Poetry Competition, the E C Gregory Awards, the Arts Council Awards, the Forward Prizes, the National Poetry Competition, and the T S Eliot Award. She is current Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group, founded by her husband Peter Redgrove in 1972. Over the last twenty-five years she has given numerous public readings at venues including The Voice Box, Poetry International at the South Bank, the Belfast Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival and the Cheltenham Festival. Recently she has read at, among other places, Ways with Words at Dartington, Kings Lynn Festival, Poetry-next-the-Sea Festival, Colpitts, The Troubadour Poetry Café in London, Language Club Plymouth, Goodenoughe College London, and Brighton.
 
She has also led poetry workshops in many of these venues. In 2010 she is reading at Ledbury, Tor Bay, King’s Lynn and Poetry on the Lake Festivals and at Poetry in the Crypt, and at Poetry East in London (January 2011).
 
She is a tutor for The Poetry School, The Arvon Foundation, Second Light Network and Ty Newydd. She also tutors at residential poetry courses abroad –
 
LE MOULIN CENTRE IN NORMANDIE, FRANCE, June 5 – 12, 2010, details from Penelope or from Kay Cotton at Le Moulin Centre
 
and ALMASERRA VELLA, SPAIN in October 2010. Details of Almaserra Vella course from Christopher North.
 
She also works with individual poets in one-to-one sessions.