Photo: Ekaterina Voskresenskaya
Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, literary biographer and writer about place. A former professional violinist, she has a PhD in applied philosophy of language and is presently Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton.
Fiona’s more than 30 books range from poetry collections to academic monographs by way of edited anthologies, book-length writing about life and place, and biographies of Romantic figures.
Her work has been translated into 38 languages, and been honoured with international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia, as well as in the UK, where it has also received critical acclaim and numerous Book of the Year commendations.
She collaborates frequently with musicians and artists, and on literary co-translation. She broadcasts, reviews in the national press, edits both periodicals and anthologies, and serves on international prize juries and on the boards of literature organisations, including of the Royal Society of Literature, the Wordsworth Trust and – currently – the Royal Literary Fund.
Fiona was born in London and lives in Herefordshire with her husband and a small menagerie of sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats – and wild carp.
‘LATEST BOOK
Limestone Country
A new edition of this perceptive, lyrical evocation and investigation. Four seemingly disparate limestone landscapes are bound together by geology, human experience, and a unique imagination. A Guardian Nature Book of the Year.
‘I have been completely captivated by the poet Fiona Sampson’s Limestone Country, […] a new way of bringing together geology, ecology and the human life these landscapes generate and sustain.’
Evening Standard
‘Fiona Sampson’s voice is something new and it’s a delight to hear it.’
W. S. Merwin
‘Haunted by fear and a surefooted, hard-won joy, Fiona Sampson celebrates that elusive and most endangered thing: a meaningful sense of place… we are reminded of an essential community with the land, and with all our good neighbours, animals and humans.’
John Burnside
‘…brilliant, heart-stopping biography [that] reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time. . . . a vividly drawn exchange between a living poet and a dead one. . . . Throughout this magical and compelling book, Sampson shows us that we, too, can speak to the dead, or, at the very least, we can listen to their words.’
Charlotte Gordon, Washington Post
‘If we get another literary biography [this year] as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.’
John Carey, Sunday Times