Description

Admin History:

Cliff Forshaw was born in 1953 in Liverpool. Aged sixteen, he left school and began working at an abattoir, before enrolling at art college to study painting. Around this time he also gained an interest in languages, studying at various institutions including Warwick and Cambridge Universities before working in several different countries including the US, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Italy and working as a freelance writer in London. After an MA in Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, London University, he completed a doctorate on Elizabethan Literature at Oxford and went on to teach at Bangor, Sheffield and Hull Universities. He still teaches at Hull University as a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing.

Forshaw has published several collections of poems including Trans (2005), Wake (2009) Tiger (2011), A Ned Kelly Hymnal (2009), Vandemonian (2013) and Pilgrim Tongues (2015). As a poet, he has also held a number of residencies: International Writer-in-Residence, Tasmanian Writers' Centre at Hobart, (2004); Djerassi Resident Artist in California (2011); Hawthornden Writing Fellow, Hawthornden Castle, Scotland (1998 and 2009); Alviogut Foundation Writers' Programme, Romania (2004); Borsec, Transylvania, Romania (2011); CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France (2014). He has won a number of awards including the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award for Poetry (2002) and has been Poetry and Prosody Consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary since 2006.

He is also a founder member of the Humber Writers and his work has been included in all of their anthologies including Postcards from Hull (2011) and Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads (2012), both of which were produced for the annual Humber Mouth Festival. For three of the Humber Writers' anthologies (Drift; Under Travelling Skies and Slipway), Forshaw has also created short films to accompany the respective books. He also continues to paint and has exhibited work in England and the US; he contributed some of his own paintings and photographs to illustrate the works of the Humber Writers.

Other areas on which Forshaw has written, include Renaissance poetry, translation and myth. He is also keenly interested in the satirists such as John Marston who operated during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.

The Humber Writers is a group of poets and other writers, who have produced collective works inspired by Hull and the surrounding area. Several of their works have been commissioned specifically for literary festivals or awards including the Humber Mouth Festival, the Beverley Literature Festival and the Larkin25 Awards. Their anthologies include Architexts (2007), Drift (2008), Hide (2010), Postcards from Hull (2011), Slipway (2013), Under Travelling Skies (2012) and Incoming (2014).

Description:

This collection contains published works of poetry by Cliff Forshaw as well as anthologies produced by the Humber Writers, of which Cliff Forshaw is a member.