B. 1950

Poet and writer Sheenagh Pugh was born in Birmingham, England, and earned her BA at the University of Bristol. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Crowded by Shadows (1977); Prisoners of Transience (1985); Selected Poems (1990); Stonelight (1999), which won the Wales Book of the Year award; The Beautiful Lie (2002), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize; The Movement of Bodies (2005), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Short Days, Long Shadows (2014), among others. By utilizing cultural and geological histories, Pugh’s work offers wry and sometimes ironic narratives of human effort and defeat. Her poems have been anthologized in Poems on the Underground (1996) and The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry (1989).

Pugh has written two novels: Kirstie’s Witnesses (1998) and Folk Music (1999). She is also the author of the critical study The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (2005). She is a noted translator of German, French, and ancient Greek, and her own poetry has been translated into many languages.

Her many honors and awards include the Forward Prize for best single poem, the Bridport Prize, two-time winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, the British Comparative Literature Association’s Translation Prize, and the Roland Mathias Prize. She taught creative writing for many years at the University of Glamorgan and currently lives in Shetland, Scotland.