Kate Clanchy is the author of two prize-winning collections of poetry, the acclaimed Slattern (1995), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) and a Somerset Maugham Award, and Samarkand (1999), which was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been broadcast by BBC Radio and published in various newspapers and magazines including The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She also writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Her latest collection is Newborn (2004), a collection of poems covering pregnancy, birth and caring for a new baby.
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with two children.
Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was the recipient of the Forward prize in 1996.
Her second collection, Dart, was published by Faber in 2002 to great acclaim and won the 2002 T. S Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Oswald has also written a third collection, Woods etc, and edited an anthology of poems, The Thunder Mutters, both of which will be published in spring 2005.
Ranjit Hoskote's six books include three collections of poetry, most recently The sleepwalker's archive (2001). He is the editor of Reasons for belonging: Fourteen contemporary Indian poets (Penguin India 2002). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature, 1996
It’s like a puppet show with legs
an interchangeable sea of protestors
stomping through the umbrella trees of Hyde Park-
a surge of chants spilling in spasmodic waves through the crowd: No War No War No War No War No War No War
The placards held high are an angry blend of Marxist ideology,
imaginative word play & the disgruntled marginalised voices of grandmothers, unionists & the young:
COALITION OF THE UNWILLING
Let’s Try Pre-emptive PEACE
STOP THE MAD COWBOY DISEASE
NO OZ BLOOD FOR OIL
EMPTY WARHEAD- FOUND IN WASHINGTON