Janet sutherland

Home Farm

Janet Sutherland's latest poetry collection

Available from Shearsman Books & Amazon

Published January 2019

My Story

I have four collections from Shearsman Books. 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.

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.

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

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