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Susan Utting is winner of the Peterloo Poetry Prize 2007. Her most recent collection, Houses Without Walls, (Two Rivers Press) was featured in the Independent on Sunday and has been widely and warmly reviewed, with a poem from the collection included in the best single poem category of the Forward Book of Poetry 2007.

Her work has won many awards, including a Poetry Business Prize for the collection Something Small is Missing. She has won the Berkshire Poetry Prize, was a winner in the Academi Cardiff International and has twice been short listed for the Arvon Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop Books.

Susan runs poetry workshops country wide and has taught poetry & creative writing at Reading University for many years.  She was appointed Community Laureate for Southern Arts' Year of the Artist 2000/2001 and received  the 2005-6 Creative Writing Fellowship from Reading University’s School of English & American Literature.

She is the founder of Reading's acclaimed Poets' Café, a member of Thin Raft Poets and Late Shift Poetry Ensemble. She has read and performed her poetry at arts venues and festivals including Edinburgh, StAnza at St Andrew’s, Ledbury, and for the Poetry Trust at Aldeburgh 2007.

 

REVIEWS

These are intelligent, wittily passionate poems. Susan Utting has an eye for real and telling details.

David Constantine

Poets are often praised for knowing what to leave out. Susan Utting knows what to leave in. Ordinary things gain an almost hallucinatory vividness in her richly textured poems. Utting animates life's brittle edges and her poems carry unforced emotional weight.

Moniza Alvi

Susan Utting’s underlying concerns, love, loss, memory and the absence of it, among others, are universal, but she reveals them to us through a world that is unfamiliar, disconcerting and just beyond momentary recognition. Her subtly crafted pieces whisk us into a carnival samba of acrobats, nocturnal topiarists, castanets, pocket knives, splinters of broken china, snatches of rhyme, song, riddle, and long-distance telephone haiku. A stunning book, its disarming, kaleidoscope vision takes the reader into the jumbled interiors of houses without walls, into the heart of what it is to be human.

Anne-Marie Fyfe

 

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(via poetry p f)

Susan Utting web-site

poetry favourites:
poetry business
Two Rivers Press

and in the shop ...
collections - "Houses Without Walls" Two Rivers Press;
"Striptease", Smith/Doorstop


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