Originally from Portadown, County Armagh, Sam Gardiner won the National Poetry Competition in 1993 with Protestant Windows.

A winner in the 2005 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition, his pamphlet The Picture Never Taken, was published in 2005 and is a book of loss and elegy, of going on alone. It tells an honest, recognisable human story deepened and broadened by means of mythic references.

Sam lives in Grimsby and his most recent collection is The Morning After.

Sam Gardiner was awarded an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2002 and has published three collections, all favourably noticed in the Guardian or the TLS (“Everybody should read these marvellous poems” Guardian); he wrote the Poem of the Week in April 2011.