Matt Bryden

Matt Bryden’s first pamphlet Night Porter won the 2010 Templar pamphlet prize. His full-length collection Boxing the Compass was published by Templar in 2013. More recently, The Glassblower’s House, winner of the 2023 Live Canon pamphlet competition, is an exploration of fatherhood against a background of personal catastrophe. A keen classicist, while studying for a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, Matt wrote a long essay on Christopher Logue’s War Music that was nominated for the Arthur Terry award for writing that links history and literature. 

In addition to running national poetry competitions for young people, Matt has been supported by the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society, the Betjeman Society and the George Orwell Foundation. Matt has assisted numerous young writers in finding their voices. His online interactive Poetry Map, designed to prepare GCSE students for the Unseen Poem question, won an honourable mention at the 2018 Electronic Literature awards. Matt’s poetry has won the William Soutar prize, the Charroux Memoir prize and, in 2018, a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature for Lost and Found, a project that steps through the Lost Property Office at Bristol Temple Meads to re-emerge amidst the Greek Underworld. 

Matt’s teaching career has taken him to Poland, the Czech Republic, Tuscany, Turkey and South Sudan. He lives in Devon with his daughter.