Biography

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, literary biographer and writer about place. Her seventh and most recent poetry collection, Come Down (2021), received the European Lyric Atlas Prize, Naim Frashëri Laureateship, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Awarded an MBE for services to literature, she’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Wordsworth Trust. Her critically acclaimed work has received many Book of the Year selections and been translated into 38 languages.

Fiona Sampson is best known for her poetry, which has received international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia and, in the UK, the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Award, and multiple awards each from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Poetry Book Society. Rough Music was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Forward prize and Common Prayer was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot prize and included a poem which was finalist for Forward single poem prize.

Long known as an ecopoet, Fiona’s latest three poetry collections in particular – Coleshill (2013), The Catch (2016) and the prize-winning Come Down (2021) – are explorations of rural psycho-geographies in Oxfordshire, France and the Welsh borders. Her writing for place also includes her study of Limestone Country, which was a Guardian Book of the Year, and the ambitious Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic countryside (2022), which includes illustrations from her father’s archive. In 2025 she will complete work on Green Thought: Ecology as Political Philosophy (Verso, 2026).

As a Romanticist, she edited Faber’s ‘Poet to Poet’ edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley: the girl who wrote Frankenstein, which appeared in 2018, was followed by Two-Way Mirror: the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and PEN’s International Biography Prize. She’s at work on Becoming George, a biography of George Sand (for Penguin and W.W. Norton 2026), and a study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (for Princeton University Press 2028).

Her thirty books to date also include a study of contemporary British poetics, Beyond the Lyric (Penguin 2012) and the monograph Lyric Cousins: poetry and musical form (2016). She’s edited a centenary anthology of Poetry Review, the national periodical of record which she edited for seven years, and a handbook on Creative Writing in Health and Social Care, a field in which she worked for some years – and in which she co-wrote a number of pioneering studies.

Also a critic, broadcaster and librettist, this former professional chamber musician collaborates frequently with musicians and visual artists, and in translation. She recently coauthored Collaborative Poetry Translation (Routledge), serves internationally on literary juries and the boards of publishing houses and literary NGOs, has founded and directed an international poetry festival, was a Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. She is Professor Emerita of Poetry, the University of Roehampton.