January - Peter Sansom

Peter Sansom's Everything You've Heard is True (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1990) was a notable dbut. The Times declared the poems on his Nottinghamshire childhood 'as good as Tony Harrison's adventures in a similar vein', celebrating 'a promising and unpretentious start'. In the Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy noted his 'mature assurance'. 'His poems are witty, realistic and imaginative,' said Peter Porter (Observer). 'Auden, Haydn and Uccello live in his pages as happily as snooker stars, Tesco and Extra Strong Mints'.

January is more ambitious. The surrealism of daily life lived inventively and cheerfully at or near the edge comes into its own. Sansom, a voracious reader, has learned his own lessons from the New York School, eastern Europe and his contemporaries. Playfulness is now more serious, though no less amusing, than before. There's candour in his confessions, and a novel particularity in his evocations of Yorkshire town-scapes. The characters that speak in his poems have real voices, complex representative hearts.

Peter Sansom was born in 1958 in Nottinghamshire. For ten years Peter taught the MA Poetry at Huddersfield University, and more recently he was Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds University. He is currently Company Poet with Prudential. He is also a director with Ann Sansom of the Poetry Business in Sheffield, where they edit The North magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books.
His influential book, Writing Poems, is published by Bloodaxe (1994).Carcanet publish his four previous collections: Everything You've Heard is True, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (1990), January (1994), for which he received an Arts Council Writer's Bursary and an award from the Society of Authors, Point of Sale (2000) and The Last Place on Earth (2006). His books have earned admiring reviews and a loyal following. He is married to the poet, Ann Sansom and has four children. He has had a number of jobs: as writer-in-residence with Marks and Spencer, for instance, and as Guest Poet at The Times Educational Supplement, in addition to writing radio plays.
His poem commissions include for The Guardian, The Observer, Radio Three, The Big Breakfast, a billboard in the centre of Lancaster and The Swedish Club which is a Marine Insurers in Gothenburg.