Fiona Ruth Sampson, Born 1963 is a British poet, writer, editor, translator and academic who was the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark. She received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.

Education

Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music and then studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Career

Sampson is currently Emeritus Professor of the University of Roehampton and a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. She lives in Herefordshire

Poetry

Sampson has been publishing poetry since 1996 and some of her earlier work is held at The Poetry Archive. Her work has been translated into several languages and her own translations include the work of Jaan Kaplinski and Amir Or. Her themes are faith and landscape. Her first full collection, Folding the Real was published in 2001 and followed by The Distance Between Us (2005), a novel in verse. Her poem Trumpeldor Beach was shortlisted for the 2006 Forward Prize. Her later poetry collections include Common Prayer (2007); shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Rough Music (2010) shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Forward Poetry Prize, and Coleshill (2013). Her eighth collection, Come Down (2019) was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year (Poetry). From 2005 to 2012, Sampson was the editor of Poetry Review, the oldest and most widely read poetry journal in the UK. She was the first woman editor of the journal since Muriel Spark (1947–49). During this time she published a critical anthology A Century of Poetry Review (Carcanet, 2009), a writing manual Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide (2009), a volume of lectures, Music Lessons, and Beyond the Lyric: a map of contemporary British poetry (Penguin Random House, 2012), a study of the poetry mainstream in the late 20th Century. In 2013 Sampson became Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and the Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre. She created the Roehampton Prize for Poetry and chaired the judges in 2015 and 2017. Here she founded Poem, a quarterly international review. 19 issues were published between 2013-2018. The centre along with Roehampton's Creative Writing program was closed in 2022.

Literary Criticism and Biography

Sampson is interested in the Romantics. Her Faber Poet to Poet edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published in 2012. Starlight Wood: Walking Back to the Romantic Countryside, a collection of 'Romantic' walks was published by Corsair in 2022. In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein. was a finalist for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed prize. This was followed by Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021) which was longlisted for the Biographers International Organisation Plutarch Prize 2021,

Other

Sampson has been a judge for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Irish Times IMPAC Awards (now International Dublin Literary Award), the 2011 Forward Poetry Prizes, the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2016 Ondaatje Prize. From 2013 to 2016 she was a judge for the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards.She chaired the 2015 and 2016 European Lyric Atlas Prize (in Bosnia). Sampson is a former musician and has worked with composers, including commissions with Sally Beamish, Stephen Goss and Philip Grange. In 2016 she published a study of musical forms and poetry, Lyric Cousins: Music l Form in Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Sampson has published scholarly works and works for general readers on the subject of writing and health care (below). As a journalist, Sampson has reviewed for the Guardian and Independent newspapers and the Spectator and Tablet magazines.

Awards and honours

Sampson has received the Newdigate Prize from the University of Oxford and a Cholmondeley Award. Sampson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, where she has served on the Council, and of the English Association and the Wordsworth Trust. She received an MBE for services to literature in 2017.

Selected bibliography

WORDS FOR MUSIC: