Picture by Kitty Sullivan

Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books – including poetry, philosophy of language and books on writing process – of which the most recent are Common Prayer (Carcanet 2007) short-listed for the T.S.Eliot Prize, The Distance Between Us (Seren, 2005) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (with Celia Hunt, Macmillan, 2005). Earlier books include The Self on the Page (1999, with Celia Hunt) and Creative Writing in Health and Social Care (2005); Folding the Real (Seren, 2001) and The Healing Word (Poetry Society, 1999). Her awards include the Newdigate Prize; ‘Trumpeldor Beach’ was short-listed for the 2006 Forward prize; and she has been widely translated, with eight books in translation, including Patuvachki Dnevnik (Travel Diary), awarded the 2003 Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). Other prizes include writers’ awards form the Arts Councils of England and Wales and the Society of Authors, and, in the US, the Literary Review’s annual Charles Angoff Award. After a first life as a violinist, she was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Nijmegen. She has a PhD in the philosophy of language and was AHRC Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University in 2002-5. She consults internationally on writing in health care, a field she pioneered in the UK, and contributes to The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Liberal and BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. Her many translations include volumes of Jaan Kaplinski and of Amir Or, an anthology of younger Central European poets, and Orient Express, of which she was founding editor. She is the editor of Poetry Review.

 

From October 2007 to September 2008 Fiona Sampson held a Warwick\RSC Fellowship in Creativity and Performance at the CAPITAL Centre. Her Fellowship project was titled Playing It Out: A Poetics of Musical Apprehension in which she explored the analogies between the ways that conceptual space is enacted by music and poetry, and the implications of these analoges for the teaching of poetics. In February 2008 she presented her poem Shubertiad written in response to Shubert's Cello Quintet, performed with the Coull Quartet. In November of that year she convened a Colloquium, Beyond the Lyric, at the CAPITAL Centre.

 

 

Follow this link to Shubertiad, a poem composed by Fiona Sampson as part of her Fellowship.