Sean Bonney

Poet and critic Sean Bonney was born in Brighton, England. He grew up in the north of England and lived in London for much of his life. His work, influenced by the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, was known for its engagement with political activism and progressive ideals. He often performed at protests, as well as in pubs and other public spaces. Bonney taught a seminar on poetry and revolution at the University of Cambridge and was an organizer of the 2012 Poetry and Revolution conference at Birkbeck, University of London, where he earned his PhD a year later.

Bonney’s many collections of poetry include Our Death (2019), Letters Against the Firmament (2016), which was the 2015 Verso Book of the Year, The Commons (2011), Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005), and Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (2011). He also published criticism on the work of Amiri Baraka, Anna Mendelssohn, Jean Genet, Ulrike Meinhof, and others. His articles appeared in the ICA Bulletin, PORES: A Journal of Poetics Research, Mute, and elsewhere. With his wife, the poet Frances Kruk, he edited the press Yt Communication.

In 2015, Bonney moved from London to Berlin, Germany to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

He died in an accident in Berlin in 2019.