AL: Hi Rachel. How are you? What poetry has been seeing you through these difficult times?  RL: Throughout early-to-mid lockdown I couldn’t read a thing. That’s never happened before. I’ve always found solace in reading. Then I started chain-smoking novels. [...]

DG: How are you? What’s life like where you are, at the time of writing? IE: I’m okay, I’m alright. Life for me at the moment oscillates between intense mundanity, intense emotional distress, absolute boredom, craving human touch and attention [...]

PL: Firstly, huge congratulations on winning 1st prize in this year’s competition! Ilya was extremely impressed by the quality of the entries, so this is a great achievement. Can you tell us a little about when and why you wrote [...]

Poetry London: Many congratulations on winning 3rd prize in this year’s competition! Can you tell us a little about when and why you wrote this poem, and why you felt it was the right one to submit to the prize? [...]

Poetry London: Firstly, many congratulations on winning 2nd prize in this year’s competition! Ilya was extremely impressed by the quality of the entries, so this is no small achievement. Can you tell us a little about when and why you [...]

Poetry London regularly dedicates a third of its pages to poets who are new to the magazine. Here, Poetry Editor Martha Sprackland chats to Poetry London first-timer James Conor Patterson, whose wonderful poem ‘Dead Cat Bounce’ is published in the Summer issue of [...]

Victoria Adukwei Bulley interviews Natalie Diaz in a time of lockdown VAB: I’d love to begin by asking you this: what is a poem? ND: A poem is like a hand – the hand is never what it is, and in many ways [...]

1. What did it feel like to win the Poetry London Prize? I will be forever grateful to Kwame Dawes for choosing my poem. I feel validated and more inspired to work on my poetry. Winning the prize, alongside others [...]

1. What did it feel like to win the Poetry London Prize? Writing poetry can often be a rather isolating activity; releasing a poem out  into the world is often met with a resounding and rather dispiriting silence. To hear the news that [...]

Suji Kwock Kim talks to Danez Smith on the eve of publishing their new book, Homie SKK: How would you articulate what’s specifically ‘American’ about US poetry – keeping in mind all the limitations of that word – versus English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh poetry? [...]

PL: Dai, as Reviews Editor of Poetry London, how do you approach the editorial process for each issue and how do you make decisions about which books should be reviewed? DG: I start thinking about each issue with a couple [...]

PL: Martha, this is your first issue as editor of the magazine. How did you approach selecting poems for the issue? MS: A combination of things, for this first go. I launched myself into the submissions pile, for one, gathering [...]

Karen McCarthy Woolf talks to Ishion Hutchinson about poetry, islands and the sea as an enduring preoccupation and presence KMW: The sea is a strong motif in your work – a presence that carries with it a submarine quality, a sense of [...]

I was in the Swiss mountain village of Grindelwald in August of 2018 when I opened my Twitter app and saw that the US poet Chelsey Minnis would be giving a reading in London, at the invitation of the Poetry [...]

A few hours before the poet, novelist and playwright Fred D’ Aguiar was preparing to launch his eighth collection, Translations from Memory (Carcanet, 2018), I met with him to talk about his new work, one that will no doubt cement [...]

When I first read Ariana Reines’s third collection Mercury in 2011, I was blown away by the distinctiveness of her poetic voice and by the honesty of the writing. With its quicksilver cover, it seemed to make poetry a world [...]