Carol Rumens

Biography

Carol Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage (with Distinction) from Manchester City College in 2001.

She has held the following posts: Writer in Residence, University of Kent at Canterbury (1983-5); Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1988-90); Poet in Residence, Queen's University, Belfast (1991-3) and University College Cork (1994); Writer in Residence for the British Council, University of Stockholm (Spring 1999); Creative Writing Tutor, Queen's University, Belfast (1995-8). She was Poetry Editor for the publisher Quarto (1982-4) and the Literary Review (1984-8). She began publishing music reviews at the age of 16 and has since contributed literary journalism to a wide variety of periodicals and newspapers. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.

Her first poetry collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. Other collections include Unplayed Music (1981), joint winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Star Whisper (1983); Direct Dialling (1985); The Greening of the Snow Beach (1988), inspired by a visit to Moscow; From Berlin to Heaven (1989); and Holding Pattern (1998), shortlisted for the Belfast Arts Award for Literature, in which she wrote about her experiences living in Northern Ireland. Recent poetry titles are Hex (2002) and a Selected Poems: 1968-2004 (2004).

She is the author of a novel, Plato Park (1987), the story of a love affair between a Russian journalist and an English woman, and is editor of Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry 1964-1984 (1985) and New Women Poets (1990). She has had three plays produced: Nearly Siberia (Pascal Theatre Company, Newcastle and London, 1989), The Freak of the Week Show (EyeSpy Theatre Company, East Didsbury Studio, Manchester, 2001) and Suzanne Hecabe (Arden School of Theatre, Manchester, 2002).

Her translations, made from the Russian in collaboration with Yuri Drobyshev, are included in Pencil Letter by Irina Ratushinskaya (1988), The Poetry of Perestroika (1990), After Pushkin (2000) and Yevgenii Rein: Selected Poems (2001).

Carol Rumens is a member of the Society of Authors, a member of the Welsh Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Writing Poetry was published in 2006 and Self into Song, a book of lectures given at Newcastle University, in 2007. Her most recent poetry collections are Blind Spots (2008) and De Chirico's Threads (2010), which includes a verse-play based on the life and work of Italian painter, Georges De Chirico.

source: contemporarywriters.com