Interview: Gillian Allnutt

Jonathan Doering talks to Gillian Allnutt about her background, poetry and Quakerism

Gillian Allnutt. | Photo: © Phyllis Christopher.

As a poet, teacher and editor, Gillian Allnutt has been a clear, singular voice in British poetry since her first collection, Spitting the Pips Out, appeared in 1981. She followed that debut with other remarkable collections, her role as one of four editors of the controversial New British Poetry anthology of 1988, and more recently with her new and selected poems, How the Bicycle Shone, and the 2013 collection indwelling. To read her poems is to be struck by their elemental, worn, limber intelligence, what Adam Thorpe, the poet, playwright and novelist, praises as their sense of ‘half-revealed mystery’. Her startling, beautiful, mythic work was recognised earlier this year with the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

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