Briefly Biographical

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Rodney Pybus was educated at Rossall School, Lancashire, and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a Classics Exhibitioner. BA Classics & English, 1960; MA 1965.

In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in the north-east of England as a newspaper journalist and a producer-writer in television, specialising in documentary films, and arts and education programmes. He was a Lecturer in Mass Communication in the School of English & Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 1976-79.

After working for Northern Arts as a literature officer in Cumbria and the Lake District, he moved in 1983 to Sudbury, Suffolk, where he still lives. He has taught creative writing in schools (for WH Smith Poets-in-Schools and the Scottish Arts Council), colleges, and a hospital; for many years he taught A level English Literature and Media Studies.

He has held a Hawthornden Fellowship, Arts Council of Great Britain writer's fellowships in Cambridge and Suffolk; tutored creative writing courses for the universities of Newcastle and Essex, and for the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire and Devon.


Literary Biography

He began publishing his poetry in British magazines in the late 1960s. His first, award-winning collection In Memoriam Milena (Chatto & Windus) appeared in 1973. He was closely associated from 1964 with the literary quarterly Stand (founded by the poet Jon Silkin in 1952, and still flourishing). He was a co-editor with Lorna Tracy and Silkin for many years until the latter's death in 1997, and then an associate editor when the magazine was edited by John Kinsella and Michael Hulse.

He has given public readings of his poetry widely in Britain, and also in Ireland, the Canary Isles, France, and Australia. Venues include: the Poetry Society, the National Book League, and the Barbican Centre, London; the Morden Tower, Newcastle; Suffolk Poetry Society; literature festivals in Cambridge, Newcastle, Lancaster, Sydney, the Lake District, Harrogate, Colchester/Essex, Galway, Stratford-on-Avon, Las Palmas, Dulwich, and York; the universities of Cambridge, Newcastle, Durham, Northumbria, Bolton, Leicester, Sydney, Macquarie (Sydney), Toulouse, and Pierre & Marie Curie (Jussieu), Paris.

Awards and prizes include: Hawthornden Fellowship; The Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Society of Authors research/travel grant; Hawthornden fellowship; 1st prize, Peterloo International Poetry Competition (1989); 3rd prize, National Poetry Competition (1988);  prizewinner, Arvon International Poetry Competition (2006); prizewinner, Bridport Poetry Competition (2007).