Janet sutherland

I have five collections from Shearsman Books. The Messenger House (April 2023), Home Farm (January 2019), Bone Monkey (April 2014), Hangman's Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006). 

My poetry makes use of a great variety of lyrical forms with off-rhymes, traditional sonnets, ballads and historical narratives.

Poems appear in a wide range of magazines including Poetry Review, The New Statesman, The Rialto, The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine and are widely anthologised: from The Virago Book of Love Poetry to The New British Poetry 1968-88 (Paladin). I am a co-founder of  the Needlewriters cooperative which organises quarterly poetry events in Lewes. I won the Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition in 2017 and I  received a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2018.

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I was raised on a small tenant dairy farm in Wiltshire where we milked fifty cows. After University I lived for twenty years in East London where I worked in a clothing warehouse, for the London Borough of Hackney, and for the voluntary organisation NCVO, before settling in Lewes, East Sussex in 2001 where until recently I worked on the management team of the East Sussex and Brighton relationship charity, Relate. 

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I studied at Cardiff and Essex Universities and have an MA in American Poetry.

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I am a full time working poet, editor and freelance workshop provider and mentor.

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