Ian Seed

Ian Seed is an award-winning poet, translator, short-story writer, essayist and editor. According to the poet and critic John Ashbery, ‘The mystery and sadness of empty rooms, chance encounters in the street, trains traveling through a landscape of snow become magical in Ian Seed’s poems.’ Ian’s collection of prose poetry, New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018) was featured on BBC Radio Merseyside and was a TLS Book of the Year, while Identity Papers (2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014) were showcased on BBC Radio Three’s The Verb. His most recent book is Night Window (Shearsman, 2024).

Books of translation include The Dice Cup (Wakefield Press, US, 2023), from the French of Max Jacob, Bitter Grass (Shearsman, 2018), from the Italian of Gëzim Hajdari, and The Thief of Talant (Wakefield Press, US, 2016), the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s innovative long poem, Le Voleur de Talan. His own work has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Urdu.

Ian’s work appears in a number of anthologies, such as Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (MadHat Press, 2023); Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020); The Best Small Fictions (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017); The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2017); and The Best British Poetry (Salt, 2014). 

Ian has been running seminars and workshops in a wide range of academic and community settings for the best part of two decades. Before embarking on a career as an author and translator, he worked in different countries in Europe as an English teacher, technical translator and project manager. He now lives near Lancaster, where he enjoys walking with his family in the Morecambe Bay area and early morning jogging in the rain.