When Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work ‘has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life.’

To date she has published nine collections, including How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007); indwelling (2013); and wake (2018), all from Bloodaxe Books. She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991) and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988).

Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel (both from Bloodaxe) were  shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010.

Besides being a writer she has worked as a performer, publisher, journalist, freelance editor – and teacher. This year she celebrates fifty years of teaching in one context or another, working with students ranging in age from six to ninety-six years old! She has twice held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships – at Newcastle and York Universities. In 2009/10 she undertook a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught Creative Writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University. 

She was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle and now lives – ‘in voluntary exile’ as she says – in a former pit village in Co Durham.