Sarah Maguire’s highly-acclaimed collections of poems included Spilt Milk (Secker, 1991) The Invisible Mender (Jonathan Cape, 1997) and The Florist’s at Midnight (Jonathan Cape, 2001). Her anthology Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse was published to outstanding reviews in November 2001. A regular critic on BBC Radio Arts programmes, Sarah presented Good Books for the World Service. Her reviews and articles appeared in the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Poetry Review and Times Literary Supplement, and she was a contributor to Strong Words, a collection of statements about poetry from the most important poets writing in English in the twentieth century. Translations of her work have been published extensively in Arabic, and she collaborated with the Palestinian poet Zakaria Mohammed on a full length collection of his poems in English translation.
Sarah was the first Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Leeds in 1996, and also taught undergraduates at Goldsmiths’ College. She had extensive experience in teaching creative writing in a wide variety of settings, such as the Arvon Foundation and London Lighthouse, and was writer in residence a Young Offenders’ Institution from 1992-93. After leaving school at the age of seventeen, Sarah trained as an apprentice gardener with the London Borough of Ealing, obtaining City & Guild Certificates in horticulture. Horticulture greatly affected her poetry, and led to her being appointed poet in residence at Chelsea Physic Garden, to Flora Poetica, and an anthology of poems about gardens, from Chatto in 2004.
