LINDA FRANCE was the first Arts Foundation Poetry Fellow in 1993. She was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and lives close to Hadrian’s Wall, near Hexham, in Northumberland. Her eight full-length poetry collections include: The Simultaneous Dress (Bloodaxe 2002) and The Toast of the Kit Cat Club (Bloodaxe 2005), a biography in verse of the 18th century traveller and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; book of days, a year renga, with ceramic fragments by Sue Dunne (Smokestack Books 2009), You are Her (Arc Publications 2010) and Reading the Flowers (Arc 2016). Linda also edited the acclaimed anthology Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe 1993), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has published several pamphlets and worked on collaborations with visual artists, sound artists and musicians.
Linda was Leverhulme Artist in Residence at Moorbank Botanic Garden, University of Newcastle (2010-11), Policy and Enterprise Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University (2013), Poet in Residence at Cheeseburn Sculpture (2014-16 – her collaboration with sound recordist Chris Watson Compass premiered in Summer 2016) and Creative Writing Fellow at Leeds University (2015-16). Her poem ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ won the Poetry Society’s 2013 National Poetry Competition. A chapbook (in English and Bulgarian, with images by award-winning artist Svoboda Tzekova), Month of Shadows, is forthcoming – the most recent outcome of a long association with poets in Sofia. Linda continues to teach and research at Newcastle University.