The Writers of Wales Database

FORD, RODERICK

Born in Swansea, Roderick was taken to Australia as an infant. When he was eight his parents moved to England, where he was brought up and educated. He dropped out in the late sixties to embrace the counterculture. The seventies found him living and working in West Africa and the Persian Gulf. He returned to the UK and lived in Bristol throughout eighties, writing consciously experimental prose works.

In the early 1990s Roderick began writing and studying poetry and by 1994 had decided to devote his life to it. He signalled this commitment by moving to Paris, where he joined the innovative workshop that had just been formed at the British Institute by English poet Douglas Oliver and American poet Alice Notley. Thereafter, using Paris as a base, he travelled in Europe and lived for long periods in Amsterdam, Venice, Stockholm and Svartsö (a wooded island in the Baltic). These engagements with different cultures informed and deepened his poetry, always allowing him to return to Paris enriched with new perspectives.

Roderick’s antecedents were Welsh, Irish and English and visiting Ireland for the first time in 1999, he decided to make his home there. In the year 2000 he was invited to join the Stephen’s Green workshop in Dublin, chaired by Sheila O’Hagan, and took part in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions readings. In 2004 he began entering competitions and was winner of the 2004 Listowel Poetry Collection prize. He won the 2005 Listowel Single Poem prize, was shortlisted for the 2006 Strokestown English language prize and won the Francis Ledwidge Award in 2007. His first collection The Shoreline of Falling (Bradshaw Books 2005) was shortlisted for a Glen Dimplex first book award. In the UK he had commended poems in both the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize single poem competition in 2006, a shortlisting and commendation for the Keats-Shelley Prize in 2008, and a shortlisting for the Bridport Prize in 2009. His second collection The Green Crown was published by Bradshaw Books in 2010. He lives in Dublin northside.

Selected Publications:
The Shoreline of Falling (Bradshaw Books, 2005)
The Green Crown (Bradshaw Books, 2010)