The Poetry Society

Edmund de Waal apprenticed as a potter in Canterbury, studied in Japan and then read English at Cambridge. His porcelain is in thirty international collections: most recently he has created major installations for the V&A and Tate Britain.

He is working on exhibitions for museums in the UK and America and on commissions for private clients. Edmund has also written widely on art and ceramics. His new book, The Hare with Amber Eyes, won the Costa Award for Biography in 2010 and the Ondaatje prize.

Sarah Maguire has published four highly-acclaimed collections of poetry: Spilt Milk, The Invisible Mender, The Florists at Midnight and The Pomegranates of Kandahar (a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, 2007) Sarah edited the innovative and popular anthology Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse.

Sarah has been active in translating contemporary Arabic poetry into English and co-translated A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi. She is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. In June 2008, Sarah received a prestigious Cholmondeley Award.
 

Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry collections are: Soft Keys (1993); Raising Sparks (1999); Burning Babylon (2001), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Corpus (2004), a collection of poems focused on the body, which won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize; and The Half-Healed (2008).

Apart from his work as a poet, Michaelis a novelist, and a librettist working extensively with composer James Macmillan on operas, song cycles and choral works. He is also an award-winning maker of documentaries for television and radio.