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Susan Utting Susan Utting 

ABOUT SUSAN

Susan Utting taught poetry & creative writing at Reading and Oxford Universities for over 17 years. She was appointed Community Laureate for Southern Arts' Year of the Artist and received a Creative Writing Fellowship from Reading University's School of English & American Literature.

She is the founder of Reading's acclaimed Poets' Café, has read and performed her poetry at arts venues and festivals including Edinburgh Fringe, Reading Fringe, StAnza at St Andrew's, Henley and Marlborough Literary Festivals, Ledbury Poetry Festival, and for the Poetry Trust at Aldeburgh.

Her work was selected by The Poetry Library to be recorded for Poetry International at the South Bank Centre in London, and was broadcast along with other international poets' work, at the Royal Festival Hall and South Bank Centre.

Susan's work has won many awards and prizes, including a Poetry Business Prize for the pamphlet Something Small is Missing and the Peterloo Poetry Prize for Under the Blue Ball. She was selected for The Times newspaper's best love poem prize 2010, was a winner in the Academi Cardiff International and has twice been shortlisted for the Arvon Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in The TLS, The Independent, The Telegraph; The Daily Mirror as Laureate's Choice, The Forward Book of Poetry in the best single poem category; in the New Welsh Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Poetry Society's Poetry Review. Her first full collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop Books.

Susan's 2012 poetry collection, Fair's Fair (Two Rivers Press), has been described as 'joyous, heartbreaking, ramm'd with life.' Jane Draycott writes '...the poems in Fair's Fair reveal Susan Utting's capacity to move us at its most powerful yet - a new collection of great skill and lucid tenderness.'

Work from the earlier collection, Houses Without Walls, (Two Rivers Press) was featured in the Independent on Sunday, was widely and warmly reviewed, with a poem included in the best single poem category of the Forward Book of Poetry.

Susan's New & Selected collection, Half the Human Race, which as well as new work includes poems from her three earlier full collections, was published by Two Rivers Press in 2017.