Susan Utting

Susan Utting’s work has won many awards, including the Peterloo Poetry Prize for Under the Blue Ball. She was selected for The Times newspaper’s best love poem prize 2010, was a winner in the Academi Cardiff International and has twice been shortlisted for the Arvon Poetry Prize.

She was a winner in the 1998 Book & Pamphlet Competition, with her pamphlet Something Small is Missing. And her first full collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop.

Since then Susan has had three poetry collections published by Two Rivers Press: Houses Without Walls (2006), Fair’s Fair (2012) and Half the Human Race: New & Selected Poems (2017). This most recent book includes selections from her Smith/Doorstop collection, Striptease.

Susan runs poetry workshops country wide and taught poetry & creative writing at Reading University for 17 years. She was appointed Community Laureate for Southern Arts’ Year of the Artist and received a Creative Writing Fellowship from Reading University’s School of English & American Literature.

She is the founder of Reading’s acclaimed Poets’ Café, has read and performed her poetry at arts venues and festivals including Edinburgh, StAnza at St Andrew’s, Henley and Marlborough Literary Festivals, Ledbury Poetry Festival, and for the Poetry Trust at Aldeburgh. Her work was selected by The Poetry Library to be recorded for Poetry International at the South Bank Centre in London, and was broadcast along with other international poets’ work, at the Royal Festival Hall and South Bank Centre.