Phoebe Power

Phoebe Power is a poet from Cumbria. She is the author of Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), which received the Forward prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. Further publications include the pamphlets Harp Duet (2016) and Sea Change (Guillemot, 2021). Book of Days, Phoebe’s long poem in response to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, was published in 2022 by Carcanet Press.

Phoebe’s commissioned work includes projects with Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and the National Trust relating to place, community and climate change, with her work on the Durham coast featured on BBC Radio 4’s Open Country. She enjoys collaborating with other artists, for instance on Christl (2017–22), a multimedia installation telling the story of an Austrian woman war migrant. Phoebe’s work is driven by on-site and outdoor writing practices, formal experimentation on the threshold between poetry and prose and an abiding interest in faith and spirituality. She has performed her work at venues including Ledbury Poetry Festival and Schamrock’s Festival of Women Poets in Munich, and in 2021 was a writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland.

As a tutor of creative writing, Phoebe has worked for the Poetry School, the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning and York St. John University. Having originally trained to teach English as a second language, she has a broad range of experience in educational settings, both in the UK and abroad. Phoebe has been based in York since 2016.