Fiona Sampson is a poet, literary biographer and writer about place. Raised in Aberystwyth, she returned as an adult and founded Poetryfest. Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College University of Oxford, in 2027 she received an MBE for services to literature. Her work has been translated into 38 languages, and honoured with international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia. Twice shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward prizes, she’s received a Cholmondeley award, several awards from the Society of Authors, the Newdigate Prize, and numerous Book of the Year commendations. Her seventh, most recent, poetry collection Come Down (2021) received the European Lyric Atlas Prize, Naim Frashëri Laureateship, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year.
Her critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley: the girl who wrote Frankenstein (2018) was a BBC R4 Book of the Week, Evening Standard bestseller and Observer, Independent, FT and Times Book of the Year. Two-Way Mirror: the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (W.W. Norton 2022) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and US PEN’s international biography prize. Becoming George: the invention of George Sand (Penguin Doubleday) appears in February 2026; her biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Princeton University Press) in 2028. Her writing about place includes Limestone Country (Guardian Nature Book of the Year), Starlight Wood: Walking back to the Romantic countryside (Hachette 2022) and, forthcoming, Green Thought: Ecology as Political Philosophy (Verso, 2028).
Her thirty books to date also include Percy Bysshe Shelley (Faber, 2011), Beyond the Lyric, on contemporary British poetics (Penguin 2012), Lyric Cousins (2016), on poetry and musical form, a centenary anthology of Poetry Review (which she edited for seven years) and a handbook Creative Writing in Health and Social Care, a field she worked in for many years.
Also a critic, broadcaster and librettist, she collaborates regularly with musicians and visual artists, and on translation. She coauthored Collaborative Poetry Translation (Routledge 2024) and serves internationally on literary juries and literary boards. A passionate advocate and tutor, she’s a former Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund, Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust.
