Emily Berry

Emily Berry is a poet, editor and occasional prose writer. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is the author of three poetry collections published by Faber & Faber. In 2008 she was a recipient of an Eric Gregory award for poets under thirty and her first book, Dear Boy, was published to great acclaim in 2013. It went on to win the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden prize, and was followed in 2017 by Stranger, Baby, which explores the loss of her mother in childhood. Stranger, Baby was adapted for the stage and has been translated into Swedish by Jenny Tunedal as Picknick, Blixt (Rámus vörlag, 2019). Her third collection is Unexhausted Time (2022), a Poetry Book Society choice.

Emily has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, exploring contemporary elegiac writing, as well as MAs in English Literature (from Leeds University), and in Creative and Life Writing (from Goldsmiths). Between 2016 and 2022 she was the editor of The Poetry Review, the UK’s leading poetry journal.

In addition to her poetry, she writes sleepcasts (bedtime stories) for the meditation app Headspace. She is a co-writer of The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury, 2013), a collection of recipes and breakfast miscellanea; and author of the lyric essay ‘The Secret Country of Her Mind’, about agoraphobia, dreams and the imagination, which appears in the artist’s book Many Nights (2021) by Jacqui Kenny. She lives in London, where she was born.