Graham Mort

Who is Graham Mort?

Graham Mort "is acknowledged as one of contemporary verse's most accomplished practitioners". He is the author of seven volumes of poetry, has written radio drama for BBC Radio 4, and won both the Bridport Prize and the Edge Hill prize for short fiction.

His latest poetry collection Visibility: New and Selected Poems, was published by Seren in 2007. The Guardian Review of Books comments that it "perfectly exhibits the blend of formal scrupulousness, sensory evocation and intellectual rigour that has shaped his reputation".

He received a major Eric Gregory award from the Society of Authors for his first collection of poems, A Country on Fire and Circular Breathing was a Poetry Book Society recommendation.

Graham won the 2007 Bridport International Short Story Prize, for his story "The Prince". His first collection of short fiction, Touch was published by Seren in 2010 and won the Edge Hill Prize in 2011.

Graham was born in Lancashire and studied English at Liverpool University. He worked as a mill labourer, dairy operative and psychiatric nurse before training as a teacher. He taught in schools, colleges, prisons, special education and psychiatric units before becoming a freelance writer. He gained a doctorate from the University of Glamorgan and is a Distance Learning and eLearning specialist. He has been the Director of Studies for the Open College of the Arts and is now Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature at Lancaster University where his academic research ranges from contemporary fiction and poetry and emergent African writing and narratives of diaspora to eLearning and literature development project design. He convenes the distance learning MA with Lee Horsley. See: Creative Writing at Lancaster.