Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. He has published two collections with Faber. A Word from the Loki (1995) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Floods was short listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 2000. He has edited, with Jon Turney, A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (Faber 2000) and, with John Burnside, the ecological anthology Wild Reckoning. — an anthology provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2004). His Confidential Reports, translations of the Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud, will appear in July this year under the Southward Editions imprint of ‘Cork European Capital of Culture’. In 2004 he was selected as a Next Generation poet. He teaches at Imperial College and on the Creative Writing MA at Goldsmiths College.
Assistant
Poetry Editor
Martha Kapos
Martha Kapos, Assistant Poetry Editor, was born in America, read Classics at Harvard, then came to study painting and art history at the Chelsea College of Art. She taught there, lecturing and writing on art history and poetry until 2001, when she joined Poetry London.
Her first poetry publication was a pamphlet from The Many Press in 1989. She won a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1994 and in 2000 was shortlisted for Poetry Review’s Geoffrey Dearmer ‘New Poet of the Year’ Award. Her poems have been published in Agenda, Thumbscrew, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Rialto, and the TLS.
Her first collection, My Nights in Cupid’s Palace (Enitharmon, 2003) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and won the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection.
“The best debut of the year”
Nicola Smyth – Independent Book of the Year
“Pulls out all the stops…, beautifully crafted poems laden
with rich and surprising imagery”
Sarah Corbett – Poetry Wales
“Here is a richly imaginative new voice… the poems make athletic
metaphoric leaps between domestic scenes and a macrocosmic world of nature,
geography, and cosmology… An intuitive and lyrical sensibility is
allied with unusual powers of visualisation and composition to make this
a distinctive and assured debut collection.”
Maurice Riordan – PBS Bulletin
Scott Verner, Reviews Editor since 1999, began his career as a journalist, later was a marketing consultant with major Anglo-American advertising agencies and consultancies in Philadelphia and London. In Philadelphia he sponsored poetry readings by Dylan Thomas, EE Cummings, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, WH Auden and Stephen Spender.
His poems are published in two anthologies, Tying the Song and Beyond Bedlam as well as in such journals as Sheffield Thursday, Poetry London and The American Poetry Review.
Gyongyi Vegh is an educator and a poetry enthusiast. She earned her MA in English Language and Literature at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary. She studied African-American literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, USA. Later she earned her second degree in American Studies at Eotvos University.
She taught English and trained EFL teachers in Hungary, China, Poland and Kazakhstan. She co-authored Zoom In On Britain and Hungary (Swan, 2001), an English course for young adults. She contributed to the educational website www.intercooltural.hu as a writer and editor.
In 2004 she moved to London, where she continues to work in education. She is enthusiastic about contemporary poetry and the idea of translating poetry from Hungarian into English. She joined Poetry London in May 2006.