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About the Author



Welcome to the website of the English poet and critic, Ben Wilkinson.

Ben was born in the English Midlands and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. He attended a state school and was the first of his family to go to university, receiving his first degree from the University of Sheffield. He holds an MA and PhD from Sheffield Hallam University. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, including the Poetry Business Competition and a 2014 Northern Writers' Award. His poems have frequently appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Spectator, and the TLS.   

His debut full collection of poems, Way More Than Luck, appeared from Seren Books in 2018, and was highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry that year. A second collection is due in 2022.

With Kim Moore and Paul Deaton, he edited the anthology The Result is What You See Today: Poems About Running (smith|doorstop, 2019), endorsed by Jo Pavey MBE.
 
He is currently completing the first comprehensive reader's guide to the poetry of Don Paterson, due from Liverpool University Press in 2021.

He is a keen distance runner, lifelong Liverpool Football Club fan, and among other things he has worked as a freelance poetry critic for The Guardian and other publications for over a decade. You can find many of his reviews on this site.

To contact Ben about readings, workshops and commissions, you can drop him a line at benwilko(at sign)gmail.com. Unfortunately, Ben is not able to consider unsolicited requests from publishers or authors for book reviews.

You can follow Ben on Twitter @BenWilko85.

You can find Ben's 'Power of 10' British Athletics profile here.



 

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Poetry in Motion

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