Kaddy Benyon
Poet, Radio/tv/screenwriter
About
Kaddy Benyon is a Granta New Poet. Her first collection Milk Fever (Salt, 2012) was shortlisted for the Picador poetry prize and won the Crashaw prize. Kaddy held a residency with the Bothy Project on the Scottish island of Eigg where she researched and wrote poems toward her second collection The Tidal Wife (Salt, 2018). During a residency with the Polar Museum in Cambridge, Kaddy collaborated with costume designer Lindsey Holmes on the text and textile exhibition The Snow Queen Retold. Kaddy received an Arts Council literature award to support research trips to Denmark, Finland and Lapland while writing her third collection Robbergirls: A Sapphic Retelling of The Snow Queen (Salt, 2023). She is currently writing her fourth collection.
Kaddy began her writing life as a television scriptwriter and wrote over 50 episodes of Hollyoaks and Grange Hill. She enjoys collaborating and has worked with artists, museums and charities including Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, the Fitzwilliam Museum and Addenbrooke’s Arts, a project which led to two of Kaddy’s poems being on permanent display in Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Kaddy was commissioned by the Finnish Cultural Foundation to translate Finland’s national poem ‘Lapin Kesä’ by Eino Leino.
She has contributed poems to anthologies including #MeToo: A Women’s Poetry Anthology (Fair Acre Press, 2018) and Poems for the NHS (Onslaught Press, 2018).
Kaddy is training with the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading to become a qualified copyeditor. She works as a specialist mentor to students with disabilities at the University of Cambridge.