Who We Are

Professor Andrew McMillan

His debut collection physical won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and was later named one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in the 2026 New Year Honours. His research interests centre on the body, masculinity and queer writing.

Dr Nikolai Duffy

He is the author of several books including Common (Goldsmiths, 2025), The Little Shed of Various Lamps (VerySmallKitchen, 2014) and Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (Shearsman, 2014). He is the editor of Rosmarie Waldrop’s selected poems, Gap Gardening (New Directions, 2016). He writes regular poetry reviews for The Tablet.

Professor Dame Carol Ann Duffy

Holds honorary doctorates from Liverpool, Keele, Hull, Warwick, the OU, Dundee and Edinburgh, and is a Fellow of Magdalen and Homerton Colleges, Cambridge. Her many honours include the Whitbread, Forward, Costa and T.S. Eliot Prizes. In 2025 she received the Educate North Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to poetry and education as Creative Director of the Manchester Writing School and former UK Poet Laureate.

Professor Jean Sprackland

Joined the Department of English in 2009 and became a Professor in 2016. Her collection Tilt won the Costa Poetry Award, and her creative nonfiction work Strands won the Portico Prize. She chairs the Poetry Archive and was academic lead for the development of the Manchester Poetry Library.

Becky Swain

Becky was inspired to join Manchester Poetry Library to work with the team and partners to create a public space that celebrates the power of poetry. She is an experienced youth worker, English and Drama teacher, coach and arts learning facilitator. She has led national programmes for artists and teachers with Creative Partnerships and Creativity and Culture and Education (CCE), and creative writing programmes at Arvon. A Clore Fellow (2009) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, she is currently a member of the Young Poets’ Stories poetry writing development research.

Dr Martin Kratz

Responsible for the Library’s public events programme, exhibitions and collections, and for supporting teaching, learning and research across the Library’s work with students, researchers and the wider public.

Dr Anjum Malik

A poet, scriptwriter, performer and filmmaker with more than 80 produced scripts for the BBC, ITV and independent companies, including two series of the Woman’s Hour drama The Interpreter and episodes of Coronation Street. Manchester City of Literature’s Multilingual City Poet from 2021 to 2024, she was awarded an MBE for services to literature and community. Her poetry collection Before the Rains is published by Huddersfield University Press, and she previously worked as a police officer and classical Kathak dancer before turning to writing.

Professor Antony Rowland

Won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012 and an Eric Gregory Award in 2000. His critical books include Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (2005) and Poetry as Testimony (2014); he also co-edited Choosing Tough Words: The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. His own poetry collections include The Land of Green Ginger and M, an ode to present-day Manchester. He led the English department’s REF 2021 submission, which placed in the top quartile nationally.

Dr Brian Sneeden

A poet, literary translator and editor whose debut collection, Last City, appeared in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. His translations of the Modern Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi — including Homerica and Cicada, the latter shortlisted for the National Translation Award — have won the World Literature Today Translation Award, an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He leads the Manchester Translation Series at Manchester Poetry Library and is managing and senior editor of World Poetry Books.

Dr Kim Moore

Kim Moore’s third poetry collection, The House of Broken Things, was published by Corsair in May 2026. She was awarded a Cholmondeley Award in 2026. Her second collection All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She also writes non-fiction, publishing What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop, 2022) and Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism (Seren, 2023). She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Deputy Programme Leader of the MA and MFA in Creative Writing.

She teaches poetry across undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as supervising PhD’s; I am interested in research focussing on feminism, sexism, the body, neurodiversity and class. I am also particularly interested in creative-critical research, creative non-fiction and hybrid writing, specifically the lyric essay.

Dr Malika Booker

Dr Malika Booker (FRSL) is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her pamphlet Breadfruit received a Poetry Society recommendation, and her poetry collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize. She is published with Sharon Olds and Warsan Shirein The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). She co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective) that has produced numerous award winning poets since 2001 and helped transformed the British Poetry canon. Their Anthology – Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen celebrates MPK’s twenty-year anniversary.

Malika was both a Douglas Caster Fellow and a Douglas Caster Fellow at Leeds University. A Cave Canem Fellow, Complete Works Fellow and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poetry Nine Nights was shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2017 and she is the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single poem twice: The Little Miracles (2020) and Libation (2023).

Professor Michael Symmons Roberts

Author of nine poetry collections, all published by Cape, including Drysalter, winner of the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Costa Poetry Award, and Corpus, winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund, he is also an established librettist and broadcaster — his opera The Sacrifice, written with composer James MacMillan, won the RPS Award for Opera, and he spent years at the BBC before focusing on writing full-time.

Professor Matthew Hollis

Matthew Hollis is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Biography Award, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022), a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Ground Water, a poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, 2004; Earth House was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry, 2023. He is co-editor of The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025).

Dr Adam O’Riordan

Has chaired the Manchester Poetry Prize judging panel since 2012. In 2008 he became the Wordsworth Trust’s youngest-ever poet-in-residence; his first collection, In the Flesh, won a 2011 Somerset Maugham Award. His story collection The Burning Ground was published by Bloomsbury in the UK and W. W. Norton in the US, and his second poetry collection, A Herring Famine, by Chatto in 2017.

Charlotte Schevchenko-Knight

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Her debut collection Food for the Dead was published by Jonathan Cape in 2024. She is the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, and the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection.

Her thesis in two parts titled The Inexpressible: Reframing Anorexia by Reframing Ekphrasis and Negatives explore the uses of ekphrasis to narrativise anorexia.

Alison Tanik

Alison Tanik is a Midlands-based poet/performer who has an MA in Creative Writing from MMU. My thesis is entitled: ‘Landscape of drink: an excavation, through documentary poetry, of archival silence in the former mining village of Newhall, South Derbyshire.’

My research examines how to represent absence from archive while simultaneously creating archive: how to both address and to redress archival silences. It takes as its subject the misrecorded/unrecorded histories of drinking culture in a coal mining community.

Lydia Unsworth

Lydia Unsworth is the author of seven collections of poetry and several pamphlets. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Banshee, Berlin Lit, Oxford Poetry, Salzburg Review and Shearsman Magazine, and she has performed throughout the UK, and in Europe and Canada, as well as on the BBC. Her books include Certain Manoeuvres (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2018), Mortar (Osmosis, 2021), Arthropod (Death of Workers, 2024), Stay Awhile (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2026) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (Blue Diode, 2026).

Lydia is a NWCDTP-funded PhD candidate whose creative-critical research focuses on kinship with post-industrial architecture, and the ways the urban environment and its objects impact and affect our relationships, memories, and sense of self.

Mark Pajak

Mark Pajak is a writer and researcher. His work has received a Northern Writers’ Award, a Society of Authors’ Grant, an Eric Gregory Award and a UNESCO international writing residency. His first collection, Slide, was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.

Making the Case: What does poetry do for young lives?

In England and Wales, the national curriculum was introduced in 1988. Within the statutory instrument for English, poetry was made mandatory for all pupils aged 5-16. Each year, roughly half a million young people in each of the eleven year-groups (5.5 million total) have a significant encounter with poetry at school. Yet in education policy and practice, the value of poetry has rarely been explored, and research to date has been scant.

The Making the Case research project is a collaboration between Manchester Metropolitan University, Poetry By Heart, and the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. The project has worked with young people from the South West and North West to explore the most obvious, mysterious, and obscure aspects of youth poetry interaction and impact. During in-school creative workshops throughout 2025, fourteen participants (aged 9-18) each had near-complete creative freedom to produce short autoethnographic films. In this way, the project aimed to 1) respect the autonomy of young people as co-researchers by 2) creating space within the research for their unique insights and perspectives to provoke new ideas about both poetry and young people. This fieldwork culminated in 2026 with a full exhibition of the co-researchers’ films and initial findings at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for academics, educators and policymakers.

The ongoing thesis will be the first detailed and authoritative account of the ways in which poetry can impact young people, and will inform future government policy whilst also addressing a key challenge faced by poets and poetry organisations working with children and adolescents: how to speak with confidence and credibility about why their work matters.